How to unlock your unique advantage (in anything)

Imagine a guided missile. You set the target, launch, and watch it track down its prey. Even if the target moves, no matter, the missile moves to intercept. Pretty cool right?

You may not know this, but you have a similar force inside you.

Inside your brain you have a cool little area called the RAS, the Reticular Activating System. While your brain filters out 95% of the world around you (so you don’t go totally insane) the RAS flags information as “important” so your brain doesn’t filter it out. I bet you’ve experienced this before. Have you ever bought an outfit or car and suddenly started noticing it all around you? Weren’t they around you before? Sure, but your RAS hadn’t tagged them as noteworthy. Here’s why this is so important.

We are surrounded by opportunities that would further our goals and ambitions, but we don’t notice them. The reason is because we haven’t taught our RAS what to flag as important. When you activate your RAS on a specific thing you’ll immediately begin noticing it all around you.

Let me give you an example. Three years ago my friend had just started buying and selling real state. He was on a flight and noticed the guy next to him reading a book about flipping houses. He said “If I hadn’t been so focused on real estate I never would have noticed.” Long story short, they started talking and it turned out this guy was an invester. But not just any invester. By the end of the flight he told my friend “If you ever need money let me know. I have close to a million dollars I’d be willing to invest in your company.” My friend nearly passed out. Did I mention my friend was 19 at the time? That conversation changed his life forever.

You can imagine how valuable this can be. Just like a guided missile, you lock in. You see and hear opportunities that before were invisible to you. And most importantly, that are invisible to others. This is the ultimate advantage.

Fabulous. How do we activate the RAS on whatever we want? There are 3 things you must do.

1. Clarity is power

You must clarify exactly what you want.

If you don’t know exactly what you want your RAS won’t know what to flag as important. Think about how you buy a car and then start to notice that car around you. You don’t notice all the cars that you almost bought, you notice the car that you did buy. The more specific you are, the more important it will be to you, and the more you will notice it.

2. Focus

Where focus goes, energy flows.

After you know exactly what you want, you must focus on it every day. Obsess over it, read about it, imagine yourself overcoming obstacles to get it. What you spend time focusing on signals to your RAS “Hey this is important. Notify me when you see anything similar to this.” This is why every day I write down my goal. It engrains it in me. It tells my RAS “This is important.”

3. Action

Action expends energy. We are built to conserve energy. When you take specific action, your RAS marks it as important.

This is really important. You can focus all day long on exactly what you want and you’ll start to see it around you. But if you don’t act on it, your RAS will conclude that it’s not actually that important. After all, if it was, you’d take action on it.

Specific action is always a signal that something is important to you.

If you don’t do this last step, don’t be surprised when you fall into mediocrity and wonder why you never get ahead.

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It’s not enough to activate the RAS on what we want. We also have to DE-activate it on the useless junk everyone says is important.

Do the opposite

I hate to be the voice of reason here, but we constantly shoot ourselves in the foot with this whole process. Why? Because we do the 3 steps above on the dumbest stuff possible. Things that have nothing to do with anything that matters and that take us away from our goals. We focus intently on what that celebrity is doing, or where our annoying friend went on vacation, and on and on. We spend hours farming our brains out to TV, TikTok, and video games.

When you do this you are telling your RAS what to notice. No wonder you can’t see opportunity when it smacks you in the face. But you sure know why that person on X is wrong because of... you get the point.

If you want to achieve your goals, you have to know exactly what you want, focus on it every day, and take action. You also have to stop sending mixed signals to your RAS. You have to teach it what’s not important by doing the opposite.

You can’t fill your brain with junk and expect it not to think it’s imporant.