The MONOPOLY Rule Most People Never Learn

Hey, it's Kamilah Stevenson, and around here we talk wealth. And what I want to share with you came straight out of a real moment with my own kids, and I think it's going to hit different for you, and I'm going to share that in a moment. Now, if you see me here with a scratch on my face, listen, I went to Krav Maga, and I do martial arts, and sometimes, hey, we get knickknacks, we get bruises and things like that, but I'm still here getting the information because nothing will stop me. So let me go ahead and share this story. So I was sitting there playing Monopoly with my kids the other day, and something happened that I have not been able to stop thinking about ever since, and it has nothing to do with the game. It was watching their brains switch. Now, I've seen my kids play games 100 times, very casual, very reactive, um, just kind of moving through it. But this time I saw something different. I put real money on the table, meaning whoever won the game was going to get real money. And I want you to understand that the entire energy in that room changed in about 30 seconds flat when I introduced the real money. And all of a sudden I saw them thinking and they were calculating. And, uh, during the game they were making choices and then second-guessing those choices and then defending those choices. And I'm sitting there watching this happen thinking, this is the thing that nobody talks about when we talk about wealth. Because here's what I know from my background in neuroscience: your brain does not build the pathways it needs to handle real money —by reading about money. It builds them by being in situations where the stakes are real and where the consequences are real, where you're actually having to choose. And most people never have been put in those situations consistently enough to build that type of infrastructure in their brain, especially at young ages. And that gap right there is exactly why two people can look at the same opportunity, the same information, the same moment, and walk away making completely different decisions. So today, that's what we're going to get into, because this is not just about Monopoly. This is not about your kids. This is about you and whether your brain has actually been trained to think the way wealth requires you to think. Now, I do want to say before I move forward, this is not financial advice. I'm not a financial advisor. Make sure that you make your own decisions for investment and your own decisions with money according to your convictions. Okay? Everything that I say is for educational purposes only. Only. Go ahead and like and subscribe if you have not already, and let me know in the comments what is your favorite finance game. Do you have one? Do you like Monopoly? Are there other games out there? I'd love to hear from you because I'm always trying to get different games to my children that can help them to understand finance a little better. I do have another game called Cash Flow. We haven't cracked that one open yet, but that's probably going to be next. So let me break down what really happened in that room because I want you to understand this from a science perspective, not just a feeling. When there are no real stakes, your brain operates in a kind of default mode. It's more relaxed, it's not fully engaged, it's just sitting there going through the motions. And that's fine for certain things in life, but it is the worst possible state for learning how to handle money. Because here's what neuroscience really tells us: the brain builds pathways through repetition under pressure. Not repetition alone, repetition under pressure. When the stakes are real, your brain releases a completely different cocktail of neurochemicals. Your focus sharpens, your pattern recognition activates, your decision-making centers light up in a way they simply do not when nothing is on the line. This is why my kids look completely different the moment real money hit the table. Their brains literally shifted into a different gear. And it's not because their brain somehow became smarter than it was 5 minutes ago. It's because their brain finally had a reason to perform. And here's where I need you to really hear me on this. Most people think intuition is something you were born with, like either you have good instincts with money or you don't. And I wanna dismantle that right now because that belief is keeping people broke. Intuition is not a gift. Intuition is a skill. It is built through repeated exposure to real situations where you had to make real decisions and live with real outcomes. Let me give you an example. Think about somebody who's been riding motorcycles for 20 years. They're cruising down the street and out of nowhere there's a pothole. They're not going to stop and think about it, and they will not run a set of pros and cons list in their mind. Their body is just going to move. They swerve before the conscious mind even registers what happened.. Now put somebody on that same bike for the first time, same pothole, same road. There's going to be a completely different outcome. They're not going to have the intuition because they haven't practiced this enough to develop that automated response to something that they have to react to fast. Now, what's the difference? It's not talent, it's not intelligence. It is repetition under real conditions that built real intuition over time. The same thing that would happen with a business owner or an entrepreneur who had to figure their way out. The same thing maybe with a skater. You've seen this before. You have two people coming at each other on a skating rink. The beginner panics and crashes into both of them. But the experienced skater, they just slide sideways. They find the gap and they keep moving like nothing ever happened because their brain has been in that situation enough times that it knows exactly what to do before they even think about it. And that is what we're really talking about when we talk about financial intelligence.. It's not about knowing the most information. It's about your brain having enough real reps that when the moment comes, like when the market drops or when the opportunity shows up, when you have to decide whether to hold or sell or invest or protect, your brain does not freeze. It moves. And most people never get those reps because nobody puts them in real situations with real stakes consistently enough to build that wiring. And that is gonna change today. So let's bring this out of the lab and into real life because I want you to see exactly what this looks like in practice. I do this with my kids at the grocery store, okay? And you can do it too. And it's one of the most powerful things that I've ever done as a parent. Most people say, okay, go into the store, get whatever you want, and they let the kids loose in that store. And then what happens? The cart starts filling up with everything. No thought about it, no strategy, no prioritization. Just grabbing stuff and putting them in the cart. Because when there is no limit, there's no reason to think. But I walk in and I hand my kids $20 apiece. That's it, okay? And I say, get whatever snacks you want. And I want you to picture what happens next. All of a sudden, they are reading prices, they are doing math in their heads, they are putting things back, they're comparing, they are negotiating with themselves about whether this bag of chips is really worth, you know, a dollar or $2 or whatever it costs. And if they could get 2 things for the same price, they're making trade-off decisions that 5 minutes ago they had absolutely no interest in making. That is not because the snacks changed. That's because the constraint made their brain engage in a completely different way. And here's what I need you to connect. That is exactly what happens to adults with money when they have never been given real constraints to think through, where money has always felt either unlimited or so scarce that the only move is survival. There's no middle space where strategy gets built. There's no practice ground where you learn to optimize, prioritize, delay gratification, and make intentional choices. And then a moment comes. Maybe it's in an investment opportunity. Maybe it's when the market dips. Maybe it's a decision about whether to put money into an asset or spend it on something that feels good right now. And the brain that has never practiced that kind of decision-making under real pressure, it does not rise to the occasion. It falls back to its default, which is either panic or impulse, and neither one of those build wealth. This is why I always say people do not have an information problem, they have a practice problem. You can watch every finance video on YouTube and still freeze when it's time to actually move, because watching is not the same as doing, reading is not the same as deciding, and knowing is absolutely not the same as executing under pressure. The $20 snack out is where the real education happens. Not in a textbook, not in a classroom. In the moment where something is on the line and your brain has to figure it out. And what I want you to understand is that every single time you put yourself in that situation, every time you make a real financial decision with real stakes, you are building something in your brain that cannot be taught any other way. And that's why I really try to tell you to take action on small little steps so that your brain gets that wiring. Or I'll say, hey, just hold still through the volatility Don't sell under panic stress because when you can go through a little bit of a storm, your brain starts to build that wiring to allow you to do it automatically if you continue to do it enough. Now I do want to address what does that mean for your money right now? Because everything I just walk you through is not just a parenting strategy. It's not just a fun experiment with your kids or your grandkids, although you can do it right. But this is the thing. That separates the people who build real wealth from the people who stay stuck at the level of just knowing about it. And I want to be honest with you about something. I built this community on purpose, not just to give you information, because information alone has never been the answer. If information was enough, everybody who reads financial books and watch financial videos would be wealthy. And we know that that is not how it works. What I built this community for is to give you a practice field. Now, I always say to protect yourself, think long term, start with small positioning, you know, hedge your risk. These small little things, dollar cost average, all right, these small little things that can help during the process. But think about what we do here. We look at what is happening in the economy together. We talk through what this means. We reason through what the smart move might be. We challenge each other, we sit with uncomfortable ideas, and we work through them out loud together. I'm reading the comments, I'm engaging, I'm going live, and we're sharing information with one another. And every single time you do that, you are building the neural pathways that make you sharper the next time a real decision shows up in your real life. Maybe 2 years ago you never thought about where your assets were held. Now you're thinking about custody. Now you're thinking about tax strategy. Now you're thinking about whether your LLC should be holding assets. That shift does not happen because you read one article. It happened because you kept showing up and you kept thinking it through in a space where the conversation was real, right? So that is a rep, that is a practice, that is the brain building the wiring that it needs. And here's what practice really produces, not perfection, but confidence. And confidence is what closes the gap between knowing what to do and really doing it. Okay. Confidence is what keeps you from panic selling when the market drops. Confidence is what lets you hold your position when everyone around you is losing their mind. Confidence is what makes you move when the opportunity shows up instead of waiting until it's too late. The people who win in moments like the one we are in right now are not the ones with the most information. They are the ones whose brains have been trained to act with clarity when it counts. And that training happens exactly the way that we've been talking about right now. One real decision at a time, one real conversation at a time, one real moment of putting something on the line and thinking through it. So my question for you— and I really want you to sit with this— is what is your practice field right now? Where are you being put in real situations that are building that financial muscle? Because if the answer is nowhere, then that is the gap that we need to close. Okay? And that's exactly what we do here together. Okay? Now, here's the thing. Everything we also have talked about, the practice, the rep, the structure that you build in your mind, it has to be matched by the structure you build around your money because it doesn't matter how sharp your financial instincts become if your assets are sitting in the wrong place, unprotected and getting taxed down every time they grow, right? And that is one reason why I use iTrustCapital because protecting the wealth that you build is just as important as building it. So you can hold crypto, gold and silver inside of a Roth IRA, which means those gains will grow completely tax-free. And they do have institutional-grade custody, so your assets are not scattered across retail exchanges hoping that nothing goes wrong when the volatility hits. And for my business owners, they do have treasury accounts for LLCs and trusts, so you can structure at the company level and not just personally. They also have a premium custody account as well, and again, you can put all of the assets that you believe in into those accounts. I often mention that I do have a lot of my assets inside of those accounts— XDC, HBAR, XLM, XRP, Ethereum. I have quite a few, and silver and gold as well. All right, so the link is in the description, and there is a $100 funding bonus when you open your account. And then also, everything that we talked about requires one thing to actually work in your real life, and that's structure and accountability. Because again, information without structure is just gonna become more noise. So inside of our coaching program, that's exactly what we build together. We build your portfolio blueprint, your positioning strategy, your mindset framework for staying disciplined when everything around you gets loud and emotional, because it will get loud, trust me. And the people who did the work in advance are the ones who hold steady when everything else is falling apart and when everyone else is falling apart. So if you're ready for that level of support, the link is in the description as well. And if you're not quite there yet, that's okay. Just continue to show up, okay? We're gonna be here for the long run. But the one question I do want you to answer is, where is your practice field? Because that answer is going to determine everything for your next season. Drop it in the comments for me. I do read the comments. I love those conversations. They do sharpen the whole community.. And if you've ever done the Monopoly thing or the grocery store thing with your kids or even by yourself, I want to hear about it. Tell me what happened. Tell me how their brain or your brain shifted in that moment. Now, if this video helped you to see things differently, make sure you like it and subscribe if you have not already. We are building something very real here, and I do not want you to miss what is coming. And also share this with somebody in your life who is smart enough to know better but has not found their practice field yet. Because that person needs to hear this conversation. And as always, I want you to stay wise, stay wealthy, and I'll see you in the next video.