The reticular activating system (RAS) is a life-changing idea.

But to unlock it you must understand it in simple terms, and most of the writing about it comes from PhDs who make it unnecessarily complex. Bastards.

I first heard the answer to my problem from a guy richer than me. I told him I wanted to make over $100,000 a month. He asked me how I was making money now, and how I could make more. He gave me some advice and I ignorantly replied, “oh, that's not possible.”

But he quickly gave me the answer of what I needed to do.

This didn't get my attention because my ego was way too strong at the time. I said no, that's not possible. He never talked to me ever again. Then I realized what he was trying to say.

Wanting more money isn't enough. Having a goal isn't enough. Knowing the answer isn't enough. The only way to experience real change is to first change your brain.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
Richard Bach, Illusions

Your RAS is the secret rich people have known about for years.

But it's still not mainstream. If you understand it you can literally achieve any goal & rise to the top of your field while the high school bullies scream "How'd they do that?"

Let me explain the power of your RAS and how to use it in this letter, without all the psychological jargon and brain science.

Diagram of the brain with the reticular activating system (RAS) labeled, taking in signals from the eyes, ears and body. — The reticular activating system (RAS). Via @Theholisticpsyc on X.

Once you start to think about something, you’ll start to see it everywhere. It’s like owning a red car. When you own a red Ford Focus, you’ll see red Ford Focuses everywhere. But when you own a red Ferrari, you see red Ferraris everywhere.

I would go meditate every single day for 30 minutes to an hour, I would journal all the time, and it was just really to get it into my RAS to start noticing the patterns of who I wanted to become (this would later make me millions of $$’s a year).

And so "that's not possible" is what you're facing right now. It may be on a different scale.

Maybe you're one of those people that's trying to get to 100 grand a month, or maybe you're one of those people trying to make your first $10,000 a month. We all face these beliefs at different levels in our lives. Inside of this letter, I’m going to break down the beliefs that have been invisible to you this entire time so that way you can finally become the person of your dreams.

So turn off your dopamine receptors. Let's break down these limiting beliefs together.

I - How I removed my limiting beliefs

If you've opened this letter right now, I already know something about you.

You’ve already read a bunch of books. Watched all the different stuff. You have the knowledge, you know how people are getting rich.

And you're still not there.

Neither was I.

I thought I was really smart.

But then I started to notice…

Rich people never have any limiting beliefs whenever you talk with them. They always talk about how anything is possible and they just welcome opportunity into their life.

Epictetus said it best: it is impossible for a man to begin to learn that which he thinks that he knows.

I realized that I was in my own way. The answers were very clear right in front of me, but my ego was too strong, and I was so convicted in the way that I saw things. I had tried everything out. I believed I already did that. It is not possible.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

It was my limiting beliefs talking.

You can read 100 books about money, understand money intellectually, but still be broke.

Because knowing ≠ reprogramming.

I'm 27 and I've made over $10 million online. The biggest thing that separated my ability of making millions of dollars versus the previous version of myself who was unable of making millions of dollars was beliefs.

Beliefs are what control your behaviors and control your habits and make you the way that you are.

That's the programming.

Just remember that your brain is always going to attract what it thinks of all the time. This is the role of your reticular activating system.

Becoming wealthy starts feeling less like luck or willpower and more like your regular programming.

You weren't born afraid of money. You were taught:

I need to work harder.
Wanting more is greedy.
I'm not ready yet.
This is just who I am.

Fair warning: this is gonna be a longer one. I want to dump these thoughts deep inside of your skull, so it's inevitable you're gonna become lowkey rich.

You don't know what you don't know. You don't know the beliefs that you have until you start to pay attention to the beliefs that you have.

If you're not aware of the programming, it's likely been working against you since birth.

So before we get into the beliefs that are holding you back the most, here's where they came from.

II - Everything you've been taught about money is a trap

Your brain is evolutionarily programmed to have what's known as loss aversion. A fancy saying that means your brain is built to keep you safe and not rich. Taking risks feels like death to your primitive brain.

Loss aversion curve: a $100 loss hurts more than the pleasure of a $100 gain. — Kahneman and Tversky's loss aversion curve. Via @MAnfilofyev on X.

You have decades of programming inside of your brain right now. The way that you view the world is from decades of people telling you how life needs to be. Your parents, your teachers, your friends, your boss, every person that you've ever known.

We're hardcore programmed into the beliefs that we have:

“oh, we're not that type of people.”
“We don't do those types of things.”
“We don't go out to dinner”
“We don't start businesses”
“We don't take risks”
“We don't go and travel to a new city.”

Your entire success and how much money you make is dictated by your beliefs. And if you have beliefs that limit you, then you will always be stuck making a certain amount of money.

Then you wonder why you're still not there.

The problem is not that other people have limiting beliefs. They always will.

The problem begins when you inherit their limiting beliefs as your own (you don’t have a choice on this).

They programmed you to stay trapped in a dead end career. Your school, corporations, and even your parents.

A giant hand holding a figure on strings. — Via Pinterest, artist unconfirmed.

Your parents lied to you. The school system lied to you. The world lied to you.

If you're like me, you grew up kind of lower middle class. Rich people aren't all douchebags, it's just that's what you're told because of the programming that we live in, that rich people are assholes. School taught me that if you want more out of life, you're greedy, and that success only came if you sold your soul.

So you're actually not ruining your life. Your childhood is.

The system is made to make you a really good boy, a really good girl of an employee. And for you to become the best employee, so you make the owner extremely rich.

School teaches obedience. Not wealth.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where scarcity programing is the only curriculum truly learned.

I was deciding to drop out of college. Every fiber within me was screaming, this is dangerous. But I realized the real danger was staying in a system that was built to keep me average.

Broke people are very taboo with money. It's a very sensitive subject, you don't talk about it. My household and my parents, we didn't really talk about money. I never knew how much my parents made. Love them. They never made me worry about money, but I never knew how much money they made. It was a weird subject.

Rich people talk about money like it's the weather.

And it goes deeper than money. Bacon and eggs for breakfast was programmed into our brains just a hundred years ago. It's a marketing campaign. It's a belief that we were handed by the programming of a marketer that wanted to sell more food.

That’s how deep the programming goes.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
Edward Bernays

We will challenge all of the beliefs that we have except for the ones that we hold closest and dearest to us. And those are the ones you gotta watch out for. No, no, no, we don't need to talk about those ones. We don't need to touch those thoughts or those beliefs or that programming that we have.

Show me your beliefs and hang out with me, and I'll tell you exactly how much you make. Simply by the way that you talk, the way that you perceive things, and the subconscious language that you have.

I see this very often, coaching so many people and helping so many people become rich for over seven years. I will give two people the same exact blueprint, step by step. Hey, here's how to make a hundred thousand dollars.

One person takes that information and goes and makes a hundred grand, or goes and makes a million dollars. The other person gets that information and they don't do jack sh*t with it.

That one difference between the two people is their worldview, is their beliefs, is the way that they see things.

The better that you become at managing your mindset, and the better you become at managing your beliefs, the more efficient that you will be at making money, and the easier that money will come.

Your brain is not broken. It's just running the wrong software.

Vintage illustration via Pinterest, source unconfirmed.

Stop saying "that's not possible." That's your limiting beliefs talking.

If you are so smart, why are you not rich?

III - Making more money isn't about working harder

I struggled with this for years, and I see a lot of other people struggle with it as well. They think to make more money they need to work harder, they need to grind more, they need to put in more hours, and they need to do something unique and original.

Blame Shark Tank for this.

when you go on Shark Tank, how do you become somebody who gets the Shark’s money? You have a new product, a new idea, some new technology that nobody else has come up with before. If your technology makes enough sense for the sharks, they invest in you. But real talk, that’s about how 1% of people get rich. 99% of rich people ain’t doing anything new or original.

There's nothing noble about choosing the hardest path just to feel you’re original.

Getting rich is boring. I do the same thing every week, every week… every f****ing week. Same calls, same conversations, same reports, same systems, same processes. We just make it a little bit better every week. That's it.

People that are rich are working way less than people that are slaving away, working for $5,000 a month. It's because they understand value exchange, and how money works.

If you are working harder, it's gonna take you a lot longer to be successful.

One of the best examples that I have is somebody like Taylor Swift. How does she make billions of $$’s? She's not building roads. She's not building buildings. But people love her music, and it's emotions that is so valuable to her audience. It's her being able to resonate with the people that are just like her. All she has to do is share her story, and people want to listen to her music, buy her songs, go to her concerts.

That's the crazy thing: asking yourself what is value, what is money? Once you understand that, you can start looking at the world a completely different way.

I can get water out of the tap, but I'll still pay six dollars for a Mountain Valley water bottle every single time. And the question is, why? Why would I do that? Am I a water supremacist?

Working harder is the programming. Understanding is how you get rich.

If you don't have an owner's mindset, you'll never get rich. Unless you're gonna work your way up the corporate ladder, leave your wife and kids at home, have no life whatsoever.

A lot of people have golden handcuffs, where they're working a job and they have to work holidays or make ridiculous sacrifices because they are stuck in a corporate prison that they built for themselves.

Become an owner, and not somebody who's just trading their time for money.

Your nine to five is your financial pacifier. Your nine to five makes you feel comfortable.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor

Rich people don't trade time for money. They're making money off of the systems that they built. Some of the money that I make, I work two, three, four hours a week on that money. Some weeks less than an hour. Why? Because I have systems.

The guy who never talked to me again? He's like: okay, this guy's not listening to me. He says that he wants to make more money, but he doesn't act like he wants to make more money.

Stop saying "I need to work harder." Say "what's the value?"

That brings us to:

IV - You deserve the freedom to do whatever you want

Society made you think that wanting more was greedy. If I want more, then that's gotta be greedy. Your brain thinks you’re asking for more than you’re supposed to have.

There's a lot of different money beliefs that people have that push them away from making more money. The thing is, if you don't think that you deserve to make more money, you're never gonna make more money.

There's this common theme with bank robbers. You hear stories about how they’ll rob the money and then they'll leave it in the car. They'll get out of the car and then they go. Because they don't think that that money is theirs. They don't feel like they deserve it, and so it's easy for them to forget about it.

That's the programming.

There's this good story in the Bible (Luke 11) about how there's this man who needed to get some loaves of bread. And instead of asking for one loaf of bread from his friend, he asked for three loaves of bread from his friend. He pounded on the door and yelled and screamed: I need three loaves of bread.

The Importunate Friend (Luke 11). Dalziel Brothers after John Everett Millais, The Parables of Our Lord, 1864. The Met, public domain.

Why did he need three loaves of bread? It was because it was for other people. It wasn't for him.

Ask for three loaves of bread, don't just ask for one.

You deserve more. You need more to serve the people, to do the things that you're supposed to do in this life.

Then there's the inherited money beliefs. That rich people are bad. Whenever you see a rich person, they're pretentious, or they're egotistical. I never want to be like one of those type of people. Whenever you label other people and how they are with money, and it's something that you don't like, you're just projecting your own belief which is: I don't want to be rich.

Screenshot of Table 2 and Table 4 from Klontz et al. (2011), Journal of Financial Therapy. "Rich people are greedy" is highlighted among the money avoidance beliefs, and the avoidance row shows -0.23 with gross income and -0.22 with net worth. — Some researchers actually measured this. Among 422 adults, the ones who agreed with beliefs like "rich people are greedy" earned less and had a lower net worth (Klontz, Britt, Mentzer and Klontz, Journal of Financial Therapy, 2011).

That's the programming too.

Money is an amplifier. If you're a good person, you're gonna be an even nicer person. If you're a bad person, you're gonna be an even worse person.

Don't label rich people as assholes, because what does that make you once you get rich?

I can be rich, kind, loved, free, all at the same time.

I'm telling you, the more money I make, the happier I am.

Nobody can give you permission to become successful. I can be like, hey dude, congratulations, you can become successful. That's it. Tell yourself that you have permission. You're not unworthy. You just have to decide that you're the person that can make it happen.

Stop saying "I don't want to be greedy." Say "three loaves please."

Why haven't you started already?

V - People dumber than you are making millions

This one I see often, and it's a hidden one. You're lying to yourself, which is: I'm not ready to go big yet. I don't have the certifications, I don't have the knowledge, I'm not qualified enough yet.

To tell you the truth, all that that belief is, is a fear of failure. It's a fear of public humiliation, and it's a fear that you're just not good enough. It's not that you're actually not qualified.

The comfort zone model. Redrawn from the version with 20K+ saves on Pinterest. Original designer unconfirmed.

Realize that you're a dumbass and just call yourself a dumbass: I don't know anything, and it's better.

I'll tell you damn well straight up: there are people way dumber than you, with way less experience, making way more money than you. All because of believing that they were ready, believing that they were supposed to be rich, and doing whatever it was every single day to figure it out as they go.

It's the ego speaking up saying: hey, you're not supposed to be over there. You're gonna fail, everyone's gonna think you're a loser, and you're gonna lose that money.

You're already being judged. So you might as well be judged on the things that you build.

Not ready is the programming.

We can thank public education for this. They made it seem like failure was the worst thing in the world. But I would tell you, you can't make millions without a couple of L's.

If you ever do meet rich and successful people, they all started when they weren't ready. They were thrown to the wolves and they had to figure it out on their own.

You are not going to become rich without failing. And the cool thing is, the faster you fail, the faster you'll succeed, the faster you'll get rich, the faster you'll make money, and the faster you will be where you want to be. Because if failure is inevitable, then all that means is you just gotta go fail.

What progress actually looks like. After Demetri Martin's "Success" drawing (This Is a Book, 2011). This version via Pinterest.

If someone told you that you had to fail exactly 30 times before it worked, how fast would you go fail 30 times?

You'd get that sh*t done as fast as possible. You'd be on failure 9 by Friday.

Looking back on all the money I've made now, I would get that failure done way faster, knowing how much I had to fail. Because I'm like, oh cool, I want to get to the good stuff significantly faster.

I'm not sure who came up with this quote, but I love it: most people don't succeed because they're addicted to preparation and they're allergic to execution.

This one's hard because it feels strategic, it feels mature, it feels like you're doing the right thing. But you're holding yourself back ridiculous amounts by not taking action.

Same with perfectionism. I love this quote: perfectionism is just procrastination wrapped up in a pretty box. How life works, how business works, how success works, is you just take action, you ship it, and it's gonna be broken, it's gonna be wrong. But you fix it along the way.

You already knew that. Cool. What failure are you on?

Failure is closer to success than thinking about success.
Alex Hormozi

The answers were very clear right in front of me. I said: no, that's not possible.

Stop saying "I'm not ready yet." Say "I'm on failure 9."

Your old self has to die in order for your new self to become a millionaire.

VI - You've been calling your programming "who you are." It's not.

Your nervous system doesn't respond to your goals, it responds to your identity.

The first step is recognizing your beliefs. It's not getting upset about it. Don't get pissed off, like, oh I'm a piece of sh*t, I can never be rich. There you go, those are all limiting beliefs again.

Neuroplasticity is the discovery that the programming is written in pencil, not ink.

A man's head made of a rolled-up scroll of paper, with a small figure inside writing on it. — Via Pinterest, artist unconfirmed.

Here's how I use it.

1) Write it down. Get a journal. Sit down for 45 minutes and just write down everything that you think. All of your thoughts, the way that you see the world, your future, what that looks like. The more that you do it, the better you can get through the fluffy bullsh*t at the beginning.

One thing to notice is the things that make things feel limited. Money is hard to make. I can't do that. That's hard. I am not capable of doing so. These I am statements.

"I'm not ready yet" isn't just a statement. It's a neural pathway that your brain uses to predict and generate behavior.

2) Talk to people far ahead of you. One of the ways that I became aware of the programing I was running was by talking to people that were much further ahead of me. Based off of their reaction and their body language towards the things I would say, it was instant feedback. Almost like a tuning fork as to what my beliefs were and the way that I saw the world. If I ever said anything and it scared people away, I knew: okay, whatever I just said there was important.

It's like a tape that I play over and over again.

The tape is the programming.

If you feel like nobody wants to share anything, or nobody wants to give away the information, it's because they just don't want to give the information away to you. You make them feel poor hanging out with you, and how you make them feel poor is your limiting beliefs.

3) Open your eyes. Just f*cking open your eyes, look around. If you look at cars and you add up what the original value of the car was, it adds up really quickly. Have you ever done the math? Every 50 cars that you see is a million dollars. At any given moment of just looking outside for 10 minutes, you just saw a million dollars.

There is money all around you. Are you saying that you can't make five grand a month?

For you to not be able to make money, it's a skill issue. And once you admit that you suck, it's cool, because then you can realize what you suck at, and you can get better.

4) Give it a name. You have this internal thermostat that regulates your success, and if you start to go a little bit too high, your brain starts to regulate you.

Via Pinterest. Photo attributed to Cayetano Ferrández (his El hombre gris series).

Your income isn't capped by your skills. Your income is capped by what your nervous system feels is normal.

A lot of people are about to get the new promotion, they're about to make more money, they're about to have the business succeed, and then they self-sabotage. They get sick. Nothing ever goes their way whenever they're about to be successful.

Label it. Give it a name. I usually call it the little b*tch voice.

I had my own personal story. When I was younger, people would call me Kevin, and I hated it. It was the dumb version of myself. And so I always was like, oh, that's Kevin speaking, whenever I would hold myself back.

Give it a name, or else it's gonna run your life.

Kevin is the programming.

Then honor that version of yourself and just let them rest. How great they were, how good they were, how much they served you. But that's just not who you are anymore. They're not gonna dictate your life ever again.

Your brain makes room for who you are becoming by deleting who you were.

5) Leave the room. You hypnotize yourself. As soon as you touch a door handle or you walk into a room, a smell hits your nose and it triggers you, you just go back into the old programming. The only thing that you can possibly do is remove yourself from your environment. Go travel somewhere, go to a wealthier part of town, leave your hometown.

For the entirety of this week, here's what I want you to do. Get a journal, sit down for 45 minutes, and write down everything that you think. Then write down one of the beliefs on a sticky note, and write down the opposite belief, and put it somewhere. The goal is to constantly remind yourself of the opposite of that belief.

Most people hold so dearly and tightly on to their past: oh, there was this one time I won a sports game when I was in high school. Who gives a sh*t? Who cares?

Stop saying "that's just who I am." Say "that's Kevin speaking."

You're going to become whatever you just keep on thinking

People don't say, I, Sarah, want to be broke. But they are choosing to be broke because of the way that they allow themselves to perceive the world.

Plato's Cave. Jan Saenredam after Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604. The Latin at the top is John 3:19: light came into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light. National Gallery of Art, public domain.

School wrote the programming. Your boss wrote it. Your parents wrote it.

The Cage Is Open. Words by Heather Havrilesky (Ask Polly). Artist unconfirmed, via Pinterest.

They're not the ones pressing play.

You can fight it all you want, but sooner or later you're going to have to admit the reason you're still not there. It's not the time, it's not the money, it's that some part of you already decided who you're allowed to become and you've been obeying it ever since.

Are you just gonna allow the previous programming that you've had for the past decade dictate who you are gonna be for the rest of your life? You get to choose. Do you allow your past self to dictate your future?

Do you value being comfortable, living your same exact life for the next 40 years until you die, a gravestone amongst all the gravestones? Or do you want to actually be something in your life and do something with your life?

How badly do you want to be where you're going? Because that'll allow you to overcome the beliefs.

That belief isn't the truth. It's just a story you've told yourself so many times it feels real. Change the story, change the outcome.

The more that I've leaned into my unlimited beliefs, the more unlimited my potential has become, and the more money I've made naturally as a byproduct.

If I had unlearned the need for permission earlier, I would've started way sooner.

As soon as I showed that guy that I didn't respect his answer, he just walked away, and he was out of my life.

In that moment he knew that my beliefs weren’t a match for his advice.

I wish I knew this sooner. Now you do.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms (to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way).
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

I'm rooting for you.

Nobody's gonna save you, which is kind of depressing, but also freeing.

They wrote the programming. You run it.

Now it's your responsibility to change it.

Let's get you lowkey rich.

Talk soon.

Devon

P.S If you're reading this and not subscribed, fix that now so the next one lands in your inbox.

Once You Understand Your RAS Your Life Will…