You're scrolling on the internet and you see these people making a f*ckton of money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, like it's nothing.
You hear them say, "Yeah 30K? I make that in a day." And you're thinking to yourself: what the f*ck are you talking about? That's a real thing?
What the f*ck are they doing differently? How the heck are these people just able to make whatever amount of money they make? Versus me over here slaving away, trying to work so damn hard just to make a couple grand?
This happens to us because right now making money is a conscious effort. You're having to be disciplined. You're having to show up every single day. You're needing to work for every dollar.
And then you see some kid that's making way more money than your parents, way more money than you ever found possible, and your ego gets attacked. That's why most people write it off as a scam, or daddy's money, or some nepo baby bullsh*t. At the end of the day, that's just cope.
I used to think that way. You could tell that money was just effortless for them. And I wanted to be like that.
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. – Steve Jobs, 1994
It's crazy to say now that money has become effortless for me too. Now, I'm not some Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk type of thing where I'm talking billions of dollars. But I'm 27, I've made over $10 million online, and I've had multiple days where I've made over $100,000 in a single day. And I can tell you it feels like you're literally not doing sh*t to be able to make that money.
That's what I call unconsciously rich.
Becoming unconsciously rich is the same as embodying the identity of a rich person. You don't even try. You don't even think. You just show up and do the things, without even having to think or try, that make you even more money. You show up as a person who checks the numbers on one thing, ignores everything else, and gets on one phone call and you’re printing doctor salaries monthly.
At this point it's easier for me to make money than it is for me not to make money. I don't even know how not to make money anymore. I would have to be drunk every single day for 6 months on her*in under a bridge to not make six figures in a month.
And when you get to that point, that's when you're truly free. One of the most common questions I get is, "What do you do for a living?" I don't do anything. I live for a living.
A rich person is a culmination of three things:
- An opportunist.
- Somebody competent.
- Somebody who is purpose driven.
What a rich person is made of.
Once you develop yourself in these three categories, you make sh*tloads of money unconsciously and you print millions of dollars without it being an active effort in your body. So that way you can just live your life, travel, go wherever.
Right now I'm in Italy overlooking the sea. I live out of a suitcase and I don't feel like I work a day in my life anymore. Two months ago I had my record revenue month in business, and I've been traveling full time for the past year and a half. I don't have a home base. And yet I keep making more money, because I'm constantly developing in these three categories, which doesn't require you to be in a physical location.
Turn off your dopamine receptors and lock the f*ck in. Because inside of here I'm going to give you the sauce.
If you just trust the experience of this article, your life will change. You will see differences in your life. You will be living a better life.
Fair warning: I'm going to be a little on your ass about things in this article because I believe in the power of calling someone’s bs out.
Before we get into how to get rich (or what a rich person does differently) you have to understand the system we’re told make money on is fundamentally broken.
Every unsuccessful person I know believes the game is rigged. Every successful person knows the game is rigged and learns how to play. – Justin Welsh
The mental models that you're currently operating on are built to f*ck you over and keep you stuck. This keeps a lot of people confused, so let's break it all down.
I - Why most getting rich advice is bullsh*t
A lot of it is focused around slow rich activities. Slow rich is a polite way of saying old (someone had to say it).
"If you put $500 a month into the S&P 500 for the next 40 years, you're going to be a millionaire." Yeah, that's technically true. But you also have to account for inflation. And then you also ask yourself, what the hell are you doing with your life in the meantime? Sacrificing your life for 40 years so that way you can finally enjoy your money once you're 65 years old?
A Dollar's Worth, by Visual Capitalist (2021), data from the BLS Consumer Price Index. Your $1,000,000 at 65 lives on the right-hand end of that curve.
That sounds awful. That sounds lame. I want to be rich now! I want to do stuff now! I want to make money now!
The other advice everybody has is work your way up the corporate ladder. You technically are going to make more money, especially if you work in a career for 20 years. Maybe you can get to the point where you're making $500,000 a year because you're a senior executive or something. But that is just selling your soul, kissing ass, and doing what you have to do to barely get by for years and years. If you're going to do it, you might as well just go get an investment banking job. At least you're going to get paid a lot.
And the last one is they always tell you to manifest yourself rich. Well I could just say "I'm going to get rich, I'm going to get rich, I'm going to get rich" all day and nothing would f*cking change in my life.
Instead you have to understand how people are actually getting rich in the modern day and age.
They're building a cash flowing business. They have high income skill sets that allow them to build a business, or spawn money out of thin air.
So if you want to get rich, you have to be in a better vehicle. You have to be in something that will actually allow you to make the amount of money you want to make. The issue with most people is they're stuck in a career that will take them forever to ever get rich. In order to get rich before you're old, you must find ways of making money a lot faster.
What are these opportunities? YouTube (which by the way is how I made my first million dollars). Being a social media influencer (on camera or not). Having a marketing agency. Affiliate marketing, where you're selling somebody else's product and getting a cut. Day trading or crypto. I'm not saying this is the best way of getting rich, because you're dependent on the markets. But it's a way to get to the point where you spawn money out of thin air. And building a boring business. Landscaping is a huge one. I have many friends (surprisingly) that make multiple millions of dollars a year with a landscaping business, and they're just really good at landscaping. Now, it took them seven years to get to that point, but it's still significantly faster than 40.
You're not going to get rich renting out your time. – Naval Ravikant
Nobody gets unconsciously rich renting out their time.
You need to be in control of your money through the skill sets that you have.
Stop saying "I'm being realistic." Say "I'm in the wrong vehicle."
II - Why 100 reps beat a four-year degree
The better you get at being a YouTuber, the more views you're going to get. The more views you get, the more money you're going to make. The more money you make, the better videos you can make. And the better videos you make, the more views you get. It becomes this constant feedback cycle.
The beauty of these businesses is you get a very fast feedback cycle on whether or not what you're doing is working. That's why most jobs just pay you a 9 to 5 wage. The business owner is getting the feedback cycle. The market's getting the feedback cycle. You're renting out your time.
So you have inputs, and then you have outputs. You want to close the gap of getting outputs as fast as possible. This is what is known as feedback. Once you see the outputs, you are now getting feedback. And the more feedback you get, the faster you're going to learn and the better you're going to become at the things you do. What we call the thing in between the inputs and the outputs is your process. Your system.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. – James Clear, Atomic Habits
Inputs, process, outputs, feedback. This is how feedback loops work and how systems and processes get better.
I could write 100 of these articles in the next two or three months and have more evidence, more experience of marketing, than someone would have from a four-year college degree.
The feedback loop is so damn slow going to school. When you put something out, you get immediate feedback. I get to see what the comments are saying. I get to see what the views are saying. I get to see the engagement curve, when you guys fall off and when you want to watch a moment over and over again.
These opportunities allow you to fulfill that feedback loop significantly faster, so you get way more repetitions than the average person. And when you get more repetitions than the average person, you start to be able to make more money.
You have to view success as the ability to understand data points and recognize the patterns. If I had a graph of a bunch of random dots, it just looks like a bunch of random dots. But if the x-axis is the money you made and the y-axis is the video you made, and you do lots of data points, you can see the videos you put the most amount of time into. The videos you put the most thought into. The more refined, developed ideas. The ones you copied and emulated from other people's success. And you're thinking to yourself: oh wow, they get results like this. So if I want a result like that, I need to make more videos that are over here.
The way you do that is through pattern recognition. The way you get pattern recognition is through looking at lots of data points and getting lots of feedback. And that's why people are getting so rich. With the internet you can look at so many data points so quickly. It gets to a point where you're not even thinking about how much money you're making. That's the unconscious part.
Reps = data points = pattern = money.
For the entirety of this week, here's what I want you to do: anytime you pull your card out and buy something, ask yourself how they got you to buy it. Was it the quality? Was it convenient? Did it give you an identity? Every time you buy is a chance to see how they took your money, and how you can replicate it.
So that's the opportunist. You need to jump on things. You need to see the things that can actually change your life and be somebody who jumps on these vehicles, rather than staying stagnant and comfortable in your current reality.
The vehicle I picked was YouTube. I keep the list of 300 six-figure channels where nobody's on camera. Same list I used to build mine. It's free for anyone on my letter: subscribe here and the list is yours.
III - Getting rich is a skill issue
Next, you need to become competent. The way you become competent is to master the skill sets that allow you to make money. To become unconsciously good at making money, you must become a master of money. So you have to understand the four levels of money mastery.
I call it your stupidity graph.
The Dunning-Kruger curve. Level one is the peak of Mount Stupid. Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. – Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
I hate to break it to you, but you suck at making money if you're reading this. (Unless you're one of the successful people who read these too.)
Right now you're at level one. At level one, you don't know that you don't know how to make money. You're unconsciously incompetent. You must get out of this place as fast as humanly possible and start to move into level two.
Because once you're in level two, now you know that you suck at making money. Nothing changes. You've just become conscious. You have reached a level of awareness.
And this is the hardest phase for most people. Most people realize they suck at making money, so they give up altogether and stay stuck at level one, rather than confronting the truth. They'd rather stay in this delusional state because it's better for their ego.
The reason the graph is drawn like this is because the y-axis is your ego. As soon as you find out that you suck at making money, it sucks. But then what happens is you realize you can actually finally get better.
So you read a bunch of my letters, you watch a bunch of other people's videos about how to make money, and eventually you reach level three, which is consciously competent. And then your real goal is level four, where you are unconsciously competent. Unconsciously good at making money.
So you start off unconsciously bad at making money. Then consciously bad at making money. Then consciously good at making money. Then unconsciously good at making money.
Stop saying "I'm not a money person." Say "I'm at level two."
So how do you go through these stages? All of getting rich comes down to skill sets. The more skilled you are at the tasks it takes to get rich, the more money you will make.
Getting rich is a skill issue.
I'm not pulling this out of my ass. I can teach this because of the amount of data points I've had. Over 4,000 videos in the past few years, seeing what goes viral and what doesn't. Through that, I've developed a lot of different skill sets.
Copywriting is one of the skill sets I'm using with you right here. Packaging, knowing how to title the letter and the thumbnail for it. Teaching. Some of you are going to love my teaching style. Some of you are going to be like, "dude, what the hell is this? This is a box of rocks." Sales. There's a lot of sales and influence going on inside this letter right now. I am selling my idea to you about what it means to get rich, and that's a skill set I learned after doing thousands of sales calls, recording thousands of videos, and the 20,000 posts I've done on social media. And management, running a team, which is what allows me to make all the money.
Some of these I've deliberately gone after. For copywriting, I have watched hundreds if not thousands of videos, and read a lot of the top copywriting books. For packaging, another hundred videos, and then I've uploaded over 4,000 YouTube videos across my different channels. Teaching, from lots and lots of reps. Sales, again, lots and lots of reps. Managing, from having to fire so many people, hire so many people, and rebuild my company from the ground up many, many times.
You can acquire these through trial and error, and I'm a big believer in personal failure and trial and error. You can also actively seek the knowledge.
One thing I love doing is buying courses and hiring mentors. I know, crazy, right? I will go and find courses and mentors that have the skill sets I'm looking for. I bought one called “writing with flair” on Udemy. It was like a hundred bucks, and it was one of the best courses I've ever gone through. A former editor at the Wall Street Journal broke down how one actually writes. I've bought courses on how to make videos. On how to coach people. On how to sell. On how to have better relationships. I have invested at least half a million dollars myself into different courses, so that way I can learn how to make the money I've shown you in here.
So that is really how you get unconsciously good at making money. You do lots of reps, and then you immerse yourself in the world of knowledge acquisition.
And study others. Study other people that are doing what you want to do.
If you want to get fit and jacked, don't take fitness advice from somebody who's fat. You take fitness advice from people that are jacked and have the body and the health that you want. If you want relationship advice, you don't take it from somebody who's gone through five divorces. You take it from somebody who's been in a relationship for 40 years and really understands relationships. You don't take money advice from somebody who's never taken risks in their life. I love my parents. But they're not going to be the best people when it comes to business advice. Who to hire in my company, who to keep, what videos to make.
So you need to seek out mentors. Seek out people that you can study on how they think about the world and how they act. So that way you yourself can become one of those people. It's only through mirroring and studying and copying other people that you can finally do it.
IV - Personality LARPing
Which brings me to my next point, and I love this concept. I invented it with my team. It's called Personality LARPing.
You want to live-action roleplay the reality you want to live. If you want to be somebody who's a badass who's making a ton of money and traveling the world, then start roleplaying it. Start acting as if you're that person. You need to start pretending that you're that rich dude that's able to travel the world and do whatever he wants every single day.
This is also known as the alter ego. There's a guy that wrote a good book about this, The Alter Ego Effect by Todd Herman. What you're doing is wearing a mask. You're pretending to be the superhero. You're pretending to be this badass business guy in your day to day life.
It sounds corny. But what that does, neurologically and scientifically, is it actually gets you to start acting different. It starts to give you different personality traits. Because your personal reality is just the reality you've created based off your habits and your behaviors and the way you've identified yourself.
There's fifty years of psychology behind that. Daryl Bem called it self-perception theory in 1972: you decide who you are by watching what you do. Your brain watches you skip the gym three days in a row and files you under "not a gym person." The costume isn't fake. The costume is the only evidence your brain has.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. – Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
So you need to ask yourself: who is the person I need to become?
Artist unknown, via Pinterest (1,381 saves). The reflection is the guy you're pretending to be.
I gave you the skill sets. I gave you the opportunities. So now the question is, why don't you take advantage of the opportunities? It's because you're not somebody who identifies as somebody who is successful. And because you don't identify as somebody who's successful, you're never going to actually make the change.
It all comes down to your identity.
For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he. – Proverbs 23:7
Once you have the identity, you then have the beliefs of the person who is rich. And then you start doing and acting like that person. You do the actions of the person that is rich.
A lot of people, they're seeking the actions. They're looking at what rich people do and constantly trying to figure out what activities they need to do in order to get rich. Which is actually backwards. Instead, they need to focus on becoming the rich person first, then what that person believes, and then from those beliefs and that identity you come up with your own actions.
Because it's very easy to hear "oh rich people read and learn all the time," and go read and learn a bunch of sh*t that isn't going to change your life.
Identity, then beliefs, then actions.
So you need to start acting as if you are somebody who's successful. You need to wear the mask. You need to pretend that you are somebody who is successful. So much so that it just becomes your new norm. Because once you've pretended to be somebody for long enough, your brain starts to rewire and you start to act completely differently. That's where it goes unconscious. You're not acting anymore. You just are.
Intention, action, behavior, habit, practice, second nature, who you are.
You don't become rich and then start acting rich. You act rich, and then you become it.
V - Disappear and lock in for six months
So how does this actually work? You change your environment.
Some of you are reading this thinking, I already knew that. But if you actually knew it, you wouldn't still be in the same room, would you?
Your environment is everything when it comes to who you are. Reading this right now on your phone or your computer, you're reminded of this version of yourself, because you've looked at this device so many times. If you look around your room, all these things reinforce who you are right now. It's not until you change your environment (until you shift the location you're in) that you finally start to see the world differently, rebuild new habits, and completely change the person you are.
Because right now (especially if you live in your hometown) the parents around you remind you of who you are. Your friends remind you of who you are. The color of the walls, the smell in the air, reminds you of who you are.
All of it votes for the old version of you.
There's a study on this. Wendy Wood had people log their days and found about 45% of what they did was repeated in the same place, almost every day. Nearly half your life is a rerun.
So you have to move. You have to change your location. If I were to project one lifestyle change onto people that allows them to genuinely get rich, it's move out of your parents' house. Because when you don't, you're constantly reminded of who you already were in the past.
My post from August. Same rule.
The fastest way to become the person you want to be is to put yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to become them. – Alex Hormozi
I moved 20 times by the time I turned 20. I hated the town I lived in when I went to high school, in Colorado, so I went to college in Idaho, where I knew nobody. Which is great, because it was a new start. A new life. I didn't necessarily align with all the people in Idaho, and I had a tough time staying there for a long time. But it allowed me to rewire myself because I didn't have friends holding me to who I was. I didn't have my parents reminding me of my childhood and who I used to be.
Then eventually I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I was surrounded by a bunch of entrepreneurs. Then I moved to Orange County, California, and lived there for five years. A house with other entrepreneurs, all building and trying to do different stuff. That completely rewired who I was.
Then once I made enough money and my lease was up in California, I decided: you know what, I'm just going to go travel the world and live out of my suitcase. So the last year and a half, I've literally changed my environment every single week, because I believe in this part so much. It allowed me to turbocharge the change in my life, because I'm no longer tied to a very specific person. And in this process I've 3x'd the amount of money I make, just by constantly traveling and constantly changing my environment. I'm not anchored to any belief pattern or place.
Even when I did stay in a place for a certain amount of time, I would leave and go to a mastermind event, go meet other people that are building stuff. They would help rewire and shift my beliefs and help me see the world in a completely different way.
Two psychologists at the University of Bath tested this. The nudge worked on people who had moved house in the last three months, and did nothing for people who hadn't. Call it the 90-day window. Use it.
So it's just this: you need to disappear and lock in for six months, and you will completely change your life.
My post from two weeks ago. Nine lines. That's the whole season.
Because your current friends, your current environment, they're going to hold you back. They have a certain perspective of you that they are going to reinforce. If you stay where you are, good luck trying to get rich. This is the full send advice I have. If you're a half-sender who's wanting to make a ton of money and get rich, good luck trying to do that. You must remove yourself from all other people.
Is it lonely? Yeah, it's super lonely. But it's for a time. It's for a period of your life. It's for a season. It's hard to wrap your head around changing your life forever. But if you think, okay, for the next six months I'm going through a season of leveling myself up. Of becoming somebody who's unconsciously competent and able to make a ton of money. That sounds a lot more feasible and realistic to your brain. "Oh I'm just doing this for a few months."
And you won't be doing it alone. Build a new friend group on the internet, people locking in for the same season as you. You could probably meet them in the comments of this letter (drop “locking in” down there so they can find you).
Stop saying "it'll happen when things settle down." Say "I'm locking in for a season." Say it to your friends, exactly like that. Then go.
When you physically remove yourself from this environment, it's so much easier to lock in. To stop doing drugs, to stop smoking weed, to stop watching porn, to stop doomscrolling on your phone and wasting immense amounts of time. It's only when you disappear for a season that you can completely rewire your brain. You build the habits that are actually going to get you rich, instead of what you've been doing all along.
VI - What do you actually want?
So the activity for this is to ask yourself: what is it that you want out of life? What do you want? What is your dream life?
Because when you can start really visualizing your dream life, it starts to click inside your head. "Sh*t if I was living like this, how would I act?" And then you can bring that future into your current reality bit by bit, until it just becomes who you are.
Where do you live? Are you still living in the current zip code you live in now? Are you still living in the same house? Probably not. Think no limits. Anything is possible.
What car do you drive? Are you driving a Honda Civic? A G-Wagon? A Lambo? Cars aren't everything. But it helps you understand something tangible. For me, I travel. I have a sports car, but I don't even have time to drive it because I'm never home.
What's your daily routine? Are you up in the morning grinding it out the first part of the day? Then you go to the gym, because you're somebody who really values the gym. Then lunch at a restaurant, a cappuccino, salsa dancing at 3pm? What are you doing in your day-to-day life?
For me today I woke up, got breakfast overlooking the sea here in Italy. Then I came down and wrote for an hour or two, made some content for a couple hours, went and got lunch, and went snorkeling. I was swimming with the fishes for a little bit, suntanned on the beach, came back, recorded a video. I'm about to go to dinner in town. Who knows where the rest of the night takes me. I usually wake up, eat breakfast, work a little bit, do some fun, and eat some really nice food at nice restaurants. I like novelty. I like being places I've never been to before.
What does your daily routine look like? Genuinely, what does it look like?
Artist unknown, via Pinterest (6,445 saves). Lowkey rich in one frame.
What does your spouse look like? What do they think of you? Who are your friends? What do your friends do? For me, a lot of my friends are entrepreneurs, business owners. They live very similar lives to mine.
Do you travel? Where do you travel? How do you travel? That's a good one. A lot of people want to go to Hawaii. But do you want to go to Hawaii and sit next to the bathroom with the screaming kid, because that's all you could afford for a plane ticket? Or do you want to fly first class and stay at the five-star hotel with all the crazy amenities? Are you traveling for a few days, or a whole ass month? I was just in Monaco for two weeks because I enjoyed it. I was supposed to stay there for a couple days and I was like, you know what, I'm going to stay here for a couple weeks. One day I said I'm going to go to Saint-Tropez, so we drove an hour, rented a convertible, and did that for a little bit. Just being able to jump and do whatever it is that you want.
The six questions. Answer with no limits.
The reason we do all this is so you can develop the identity of the person you want to become. Because if you can't visualize who the person is that you want to become, good luck trying to get rich. Let alone unconsciously.
When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind. – Seneca, Letters to Lucilius
Stop saying "I don't know what I want." Say "I haven't drawn the day yet."
The paradox: you've been larping this whole time
All of this advice on success really comes down to: who are you? Who are you becoming? Who's the person you want to be? Because once you understand that, now it's just showing up as that person every single day. What are their activities? What are their behaviors? Once you have the behaviors and the beliefs, then you just take the actions.
That's the whole thing. That genuinely is it. Then it's just doing it for a long enough time period that you brainwash yourself into becoming this new person, until you are unconsciously competent at the things you do.
And here's the part that should sting. You already are.
You've been roleplaying a character for years. The broke one. The one who's "not a money person." That character has a costume (the room), a script (your friends), and a routine (the phone). You perform him every single day without thinking about it.
You're already unconsciously competent. At being them.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. – attributed to Carl Jung
So the delusion isn't the problem. The direction is. You've been delusional about your limits. Be delusional about your ceiling instead.
At first it's going to feel weird. You're going to feel like you're acting. You're going to feel like you're pretending. But eventually you get to the stage where you're unconsciously good at making money. And when you're unconsciously good at making money, you're living your best life. I can't paint this picture enough. It feels so good. You just show up and live your life, and you just are. You just exist, and you get to live your best life, making whatever amount of money you could possibly think.
It's not easy. But it is simple.
Decide who you want to be. Become good at becoming the rich person. Get to the point where you're unconsciously just doing the things that make you a f*ck ton of money without even having to think about it.
I believe in you.
Lock in.
Let's get you lowkey rich.
Every week I write one letter like this. The stuff I actually did, not the stuff that sounds good. They go out to my list first, and X might not show you the next one. If you want it in your inbox, it's free: join the letter here.
Talk soon.
– Devon
P.S. If you want the vehicle I picked, done for you, I put the whole YouTube system in a free training: watch it here. It's the same thing I'd walk you through on a call.
