Forget your passion; follow your talent.

S uccessful people tend to seed young minds to follow their passion and not focus on money. This is nonsense. Achieving economic security requires hard work, talent, and a tremendous focus on money. On occasion, an individual's genius will be enough to overwhelm a lack of focus and discipline. Assume you are not that person.

If you are under 40, the modern economy is transferring less wealth to you, compared to your parents at the same age. This is hard to believe, but everything is relative. The distribution of wealth is unequal across race, gender and age. Low-interest rates, tax policy, and fiscal stimulus skew the distribution of wealth. People born after 1989 have seen their share of the developed world's wealth fall from 19 per cent to nine per cent. For the first time in history, young people are no longer better off than their parents were at the same age.

This is how to defeat that misalignment. This is how to get rich.

First, money is just a construct. It is a way to express and aid an ever more complex system of bargaining and bartering. In life, you are forever bargaining what it is you can do for someone and what it is they can do for you. Before you work out how to bargain, figure yourself out. You need to understand what it is that you can offer other people. If what you are offering is not enough, you need to cultivate yourself; figure out what you can become. Once you know what this is, you can make your way toward wealth.

Defining rich. Many people make a huge amount of money for themselves, but few people rich. Financially rich is having a passive income greater than your burn. People on a path to money focus on their earnings; people on a path to wealth and being rich also focus on their burn. It’s not one's income but one's income-to-expense ratio that determines if you’re rich. It takes brains and discipline to hold onto money.

In my experience, there are five key factors to wealth—Focus, serendipity, stoicism, diversification and time.

A lack of focus is often conflated with a lack of talent. The strongest signals of future success are perseverance and resilience. And unless you are supremely disciplined, you will have to do something that gives you some enjoyment. Just do not mistake focus for passion.

Those who tell you to follow your passion are generally already rich. Instead, follow your talent. Passion comes later. The benefits of being great at something will make you passionate about whatever you do—admiration, camaraderie, money, power, satisfaction. Focus on positioning yourself to be financially successful. Get certified. Get accredited. Get trained. Get experienced. Then get passionate.

The sector you choose will have a significant multiplier effect on your talent. This is an awful reality. Someone of average talent at Google has done better over the last decade than someone outstanding at Ford or Philip Morris. Look for the best wave to ride. Any opportunity you have when you are young to choose among different paths is a profound blessing.

Focus on relationships. The most impactful economic decision you make will be who you decide to partner with. Especially who you decide to have kids with. Married people grow their net worth 75 per cent more than single people. Marry the right person, and then invest in that relationship every day. If you're married, you’ve already bet 50 per cent of your net worth on that partnership. Bring forgiveness, humility, generosity, and engagement: show up.

Cultivate discipline. Our consumer-based society manipulates our natural impulse to spend more money and consume. An entire generation of brilliant people have graduated from the best technical schools in the world, migrated to Silicon Valley, and invest their considerable talent in finding ways to serve you more advertisements so you can consume more goods. The upgrade from economy to premium to business to first-class to private jet can seem like an investment in yourself — it’s not. The most powerful forward-looking indicator of your financial freedom is not how much you earn but how much you save.

Investing. Bull markets cause humans to conflate luck with talent and dopamine with investing. Trading — as distinct from investing — can feel like work and productivity. It’s not. It’s gambling — but with worse odds and no free drinks. Only 5 per cent of active retail traders make any profit over the long term. The high accessibility to trading — such as eToro and Robinhood, with their dopamine-triggering confetti and 24-hour-a-day, volatile crypto trading — are the new drugs of choice.

Be of good character. Succeeding in life is much easier if other people want you to succeed. Economic security is in the agency of others, and you want others to want you to win. Get the engines of success and fulfilment firing on all cylinders. Do it immediately. Time is the fire in which we burn. Don't think of compounding as only a force for financial gains directly. Consider the effect of someone who has been compounding their reputation as trustworthy, reliable, consistent and disciplined over decades. That cannot be replicated.

Find your talent; your passion will follow.