Why 99% Stay Addicted and 1% Get Rich

How to Get Ahead in a Society Built to Distract You

When I was a kid, technology was a TV in the living room and a plastic shovel in the sandbox.

Today I walked past my old kindergarten and remembered how we used to dig holes in the playground.

No screens. No apps. No notifications.

Just dirt, tiny plastic shovels, and a group of kids trying to reach the center of the earth.

Now look around.

Heads down. Blue light. Infinite scroll.

Reality for young people is very different, and the numbers are not pretty:

• Around 10–15% of American adults meet the criteria for social media addiction

• About 40% of Americans aged 18–22 openly admit they feel addicted

• Teens spend an average of 4.8 hours per day on social media, heavy users much more

We live in a world where your thoughts are not entirely yours.

A world where boredom has been eliminated, and with it, a big part of real growth.

• No idle time

• No mental whitespace

• No room for deep ideas to form

Yet your entire financial future depends on attention.

If you cannot capture and direct attention, you are invisible.

If you can, you are playing a different game.

In the era of overstimulation, the few who understand attention are kings.

Not the ones addicted to feeds.

The ones who understand how those feeds work and can convert that addiction into income.

That is where this gets practical.

How I Used Attention To Make Quitting My Job Seem Easy

When I quit my job, it was not bravery.

It was math.

I already knew I could take a stranger from the internet and turn them into a paying client with a high enough probability that I would be fine.

• Not warm leads

• Not referrals

• Cold traffic

People who had never heard my name before, clicking on something I wrote, and ending up on a call with me ready to buy.

That skill changes everything.

You stop obsessing over which platform is hot this year.

You stop praying for word of mouth.

You stop tolerating nightmare clients because you are afraid no one else is coming.

If I can get in front of people, I can earn.

Simple.

That one skill has quietly funded the lifestyle I live now:

• Traveling without panicking about money

• Eating at good restaurants instead of calculating every bill

• Lifting and training without feeling guilty for not “grinding” 14 hours a day

• Having time alone to think instead of being buried in operations

• Running 80% of my business from my phone while AI agents and my team execute the boring parts

None of that came from hacks.

It came from learning how to turn cold to closed.

Cold To Closed Is The Real Black Friday Deal

Look at how most people treat Black Friday.

They wait all year to save a few hundred dollars on gadgets that spike dopamine for 48 hours, then collect dust.

• New phone case.

• Same income.

• Same calendar.

• Same problems.

If I could only buy one thing on Black Friday, it would not be hardware.

It would be a skill:

The ability to convert cold traffic into buyers.

Because in a world where:

• Ads are everywhere

• Everyone is already conditioned to click and buy

• Millions of people are glued to screens for hours every day

The person who knows how to ethically channel that attention into booked calls and invoices is the one who wins.

This is the difference between:

• Watching the economy from the outside

• Or becoming your own bank

You are already living in the attention casino.

You can either stay a gambler, or you can learn how the house operates.

It Was Not Easy At The Start

Nothing about this was “natural talent.”

I am not the loudest guy in the room.

I am not the funniest.

I am not built for dancing in TikToks.

What I did have was a willingness to practice.

I spent years:

• Writing content that almost nobody saw at first

• Testing offers that fell flat

• Fixing landing pages that did not convert

• Learning how to talk to a stranger on a call so they feel understood, not pressured

I invested my own money into ads to see how cold traffic behaves.

I learned the difference between views, clicks, calls, and cash.

Over time, one realization crystallized:

Call booking is the central skill.

If you can consistently turn:

• Unknown person into visitor

• Visitor into booked call

• Call into paying client

You do not worry about opportunity any more.

You decide when to turn it on.

And this is not limited to agencies.

• A lawyer who can turn cold traffic into booked consultations never runs out of cases

• A doctor or clinic that can convert cold traffic never worries about empty appointment slots

• A dentist who can turn strangers into long term patients does not have to race to the bottom on price

• Any local business that can systemize cold to closed stops living on “hope marketing”

The rules of the game are the same.

The product changes. The mechanism does not.

How To Get Ahead Of 99% Of People This Week

Most people will spend this Black Friday buying a slightly better screen to stare at.

You can spend it on the skill that lets you turn screens into clients.

If you are asking yourself:

“How do I get complete strangers from the internet to become paying customers and clients, reliably?”

You are in a good spot.

Because that is exactly what I am opening up right now.

Black Friday Presale: alphaOS

For this Black Friday I am running a presale for people who want to learn how I turn cold attention into clients, and how to adapt that to their own business.

Here is what we are going to cover:

• How I went from employee to fully independent the moment I knew I could close cold traffic

• How I think about attention in a world addicted to social media

• How to structure offers so strangers understand them in seconds and feel pulled toward them

• How to turn cold traffic into booked calls, not just likes and impressions

• How I run 80% of this from my phone, with AI agents and a lean team handling the repetitive work

• How lawyers, doctors, dentists, and other business owners can plug this into what they already sell, without burning out or hiring a huge marketing department

This is not about starting a business you want to escape from.

This is about learning the core skill that lets you:

• Create demand when you need it

• Raise your standards for who you work with

• Stop living at the mercy of referrals and luck

Most people will leave this Black Friday with a new gadget.

You can leave it with the blueprint for the skill that paid for my travel, my food, my training, my freedom, and the team and AI agents that help me maintain it.

If you want access to the alphaOS Black Friday presale, here’s what you’ll get:

• Ability to ask me questions in Substack private community chat

• Profitable Websites from Scratch - my flagship web design course $99 value

• Infinite Deals - that will teach you how to turn prospects into clients $250 value

https://substack.com/@briandecoded

For the next 24 hours, this offer is 50% off.

Yearly and founder subscriptions are going to include two courses that independently sold for $350, at sixth of a price.

I will end presale tomorrow, and I’ll never run a deal like this again. If you were on the fence about my money making methodologies, now is the time to act.

You are already surrounded by overstimulated attention.

The only real question is whether you keep donating yours, or you’ll turn it into income.

Chose wisely.