Have you ever asked yourself, 'Why am I not rich yet?' And, 'How will I be rich forever?' Maybe you've been trying; maybe you're intelligent, well-educated, and you work hard. And then... yeah, where is it? Seriously, where is it? If you find it, please let me know, because it...

turns out we're not the only ones asking this question. There's extensive academic research into this topic – I kind of love it, really! A load of academics, smart people, focusing their efforts trying to answer the question, 'Why the hell am I not rich?' But it is a good question, isn't it? And

today I'm going to answer that question for you. I'm also going to show you what you can do about it. If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich? I want to start by looking at the single biggest determinant of financial success; a characteristic we rarely focus

on, but we really should. I've got some of my trusty green tape again. So, this line represents wealth. At this end of the line, you're the poorest person on the planet; at this end, you're the richest. And each piece of pasta in this cup represents some of the world's

wealth. And what we know is that this group of people down here, which represent about 50% of the global population, share amongst them as much wealth as about 10 to 20 people up here. So these 10 to 20 people have as much money

combined as around about the bottom 50% of the global population. Why are they smarter? Did they work harder? Maybe yes, but surely past a certain point the influence of those factors diminishes. I mean, how much smarter can you be? People, in a way, are sort of like pasta; what I

I mean by that is each shape is different, different size, different quirks and features to it, but they're all, you know, much of a muchness within a realm of normality. If you will, 95% of the human population has an IQ between 70 and 130.

Albert Einstein's was 160. William James Sidis could read the New York Times by 18 months old, taught himself eight languages by the age of eight, and attended Harvard at 11. One of the smartest people ever, his IQ was believed to be between 250 and 300.

Being smarter doesn't make you richer. He should have been absolutely wealthy, but he wasn't. He died pretty young and was a recluse at the end of his life. I mean, it was pretty sad. But my point is, there are limits to human potential, to human talent. No one is a thousand times

smarter than anyone else, and no matter what hustle culture wants us to believe, no one can work a million hours more than anyone else. But wealth at these levels ignores those limits. Is Jeff Bezos a billion times smarter than whoever's down here? No, he's not.

Whether we like to admit it or not, humans are all pretty similar, and the range of our talents is not broad, not to this level anyway. So what's dictating success at this level? What's really going on here? Because to be a billionaire, there's one thing every

billionaire has in common; there's something that happened that made him lucky. Alexandre Pillo is a world expert in mathematical modeling. He wanted to understand how big of an impact skills have on success: intelligence, knowledge, hard work—how did they impact wealth? Because like it or

Now, we tend to use wealth as a measuring stick for success. So they created this simulation with different people of different levels of skill and personality traits, all within a normal human range. But, you know, some people were smarter than others, some were harder workers, and some had better

social skills—all skills that you would often associate with being successful. Then they ran the simulation; they ran it over and over, and every time the results were the same: wealth accumulated at the top—80% of it went to the top 20% of people, just like in the real world. But

there was no correlation between the traits. Sometimes it was the hard workers that came out on top; sometimes it was the charismatic people. There wasn't a personality trait that they could say, "This is the dominant thing; this is the thing that makes people successful." Well, that's a lie, actually; there was one

thing. As part of the study, they mimicked everyday life; they threw random events at the simulations—some unlucky events that hurt their wealth and some lucky ones that helped them build more wealth. Overwhelmingly, the subjects that won the simulation over and over again were the

lucky ones. An averagely talented individual with good luck would outperform a gifted person with bad luck. In Western society, we often ascribe success and failure to skill. Americans would call this rugged individualism. We'll say things like, "It's on you." The winner deserves

their success, and the loser, it's their fault that they lost. This idea that successful people have skills or habits that we don't, this leads us to do weird things, quite frankly, like study the morning routines of billionaires because we think they must be doing

Something that I'm not, but I hate to break it to you: the key to success is not 5 minutes of affirmations before sunning your bum hole every morning. I know you've seen that guy, but the mad thing is he's probably richer than all of us.

I want to stop and say, though, of course, skill is important in how successful you are. If you're smart and you work harder, you will, on average, go further. But there's a limit to this, that human limit that we explored before. A Swedish study showed that the correlation between

intelligence and earnings flatlines above €60,000 a year. This relationship, this level of being rich, right here, there is a huge amount of luck involved. Maybe you were born lucky. The Pew Research Center found that children of wealthy parents will go on to earn three

times as much as kids from a low-earning background. Or maybe you were born in the right place at the right time. The National Bureau of Economic Research in 2017 concluded that 90% of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents, whereas today, children born in the 80s,

in my generation, 50% of them earn more than their parents did. Or what about just those kind of sliding-doors moments where your whole life changes? I'm in no way rich, you know, not the type of wealth that we're discussing before, using rice, it's pasta, but I got furloughed for 4 weeks

and I started a YouTube channel at the exact same moment the UK population got really interested in investing. I work really hard, I honestly do. My ego wants to sit here and go, 'I did this,' but the truth is I have to acknowledge this: no COVID, no

Fast forward three years. I'm sitting here, and at the end of a random video, I just mentioned the fact that I'm looking for a video editor. A guy watches that, sends the link to his friend, who then applies for the job and is now my

editor. The other day, he told me that I've changed his life in a message. I'm just such a nice guy—I'm only messing! He deserves the money he's paid; he works super hard, he's very talented. But you know, I think about this thing: if

his friend hadn't watched all the way to the end of the video, none of that would have mattered. He may have been successful in another way later down the line; I'm sure he would have. But he got that job due to a series of fortunate events that kind of compounded on top of

each other over time. Pino's work shows us how luck, fate, right place, right time—whatever you want to call it—is a factor in success, especially when we're talking about massive amounts of it. I'm going to say again: I don't want to play down the

influence of intelligence and hard work, and I also don't want to make it out like the people at the top don't deserve their position, that they didn't earn it in some way. But I also want to point out that there are plenty of people out

there who are probably just as talented, working just as hard, who ultimately won't get those outcomes. Smart only gets you so far; we need a little bit of luck. So, UK garage aside, let's shift focus now and ask how can we make ourselves luckier in the context of building

Wealth, because it is actually possible to improve our chances here. But just before we do that, let's change my editor's life a little bit more, shall we? With today's video sponsor. So, my editor has a problem: he's working hard making these videos look lovely, but this...

here is his computer chair. I mean, look at the state of that! Today, we're going to fix this thanks to Sihoo, who have sent us a brand new chair, the Sihoo Doro S100, and also kindly sponsored this video. Here it is in the box; we're going to build

it, and then we're going to go surprise my editor with his brand new chair. It's going to be like when Oprah gave away all those cars, but I'm dishing out ergonomic furniture. For someone who sits in an office chair all day, I know

how important it is to have a chair that is ergonomic. Back pain is one of the most common reasons for work absence in the UK, and with this bad boy, my editor is never going to want to take a day off. It has 135° of recline with three

lockable positions. The back position is also adjustable, and so are the arm supports. And the best thing is the dual dynamic lumbar support, and the seating position moves as well, so you can adjust it to you. I'm 6'2", I weigh 100kg, and the

chair handles me perfectly. You also get these really fancy gloves with it. So yeah, just going to get it to my editor. Hello, mate! I got you a chair. All right, thanks. Can you help me get it in? Yeah, sure. You always answer the door with your camera out...

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Click the link to view the Searo S100 ergonomic chair. Do you know the answer to these three questions? They've been put forward as a test of financial literacy that's now been adopted by more than 20 countries. I'm going to reveal

the answers in 3, 2, 1. If you got them all right, congratulations! If you didn't, don't worry about it; you're in the right place. Rational Choice theory is this idea that people make decisions based on sensible analysis; that they weigh up the

costs and the benefits of any action that they take, and that they come to a decision that's good for them overall. But then you hear stats like 30% of 17- to 24-year-olds admit to making video calls while driving, and around 9% of all

drivers do this. It's not rational or sensible behavior, is it? So when it comes to education, the idea is that we teach people to think and learn, and then they will go out and make good decisions; they will drive their lives sensibly, if you will. But okay, then why have fewer than

half of all Americans ever asked themselves how much they need in retirement? That was a question posed by this paper published in the National Library of Medicine. How is that rational? The answer is: it's not. Because the truth is, a traditional education is not enough.

to guarantee good financial decisions or good financial outcomes, because you can be book smart and money dumb all at the same time. A basic grasp of financial concepts has been shown to improve your wealth, health, and overall well-being. One answer to the question of, 'If I'm so

smart, why am I not rich yet?' is time. The average age of an American millionaire is 61. Compounding wealth takes time—the slow route, if you will. Anyone with a little bit of an understanding about how money works would understand that. Yet, through a lack of basic financial

education, most adults fall victim to lifestyle creep. They're too cautious with their savings, and they're not engaged with their retirement at all. There are intelligent people that will never get rich because they were never shown the basics of finance. Look, I know that I'm just preaching to the choir

here; you're watching finance content at the end of the day. But there is another part to this: the fast way of making cash, if you will. And having a solid understanding of personal finance—just simply knowing where you should park your money to produce a long-term return—

will allow you to build up the reserves so if and when opportunity comes, when luck strikes, you're ready. Before I mentioned a Swedish paper that pointed out the impact of intelligence on earnings—this idea that it plateaus at around €60,000. The paper that put this idea

forward also claimed something else: the top 1% of earners are less intelligent than the people below them on the earning scale. That finding grabbed headlines all over the world—this idea that being too smart is bad for your wallet. But there's an important detail here.

that we need to look at, and I think really this is a conversation around risk. The highest-paid jobs in any economy tend to be specialized professionals that require high levels of education: solicitors, finance professionals, engineers. If you're coming out of school and you're deemed to be

one of the most intelligent people in your class, you're naturally going to be funneled towards one of these career paths, as they offer the best prospects, on paper, for high earnings. You then go on to do years of study, you pass all the qualifications that you need, and

then you get that great income. But that income won't put you in the top earners, will it? For that, you would need to be a business owner. There's a paradox of sorts here: the brightest people get the best jobs and, as such, earn less than

they might have done because they're less incentivized to take a risk on being self-employed. Most businesses fail, even though started by really smart people. If you're earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, that jump, that risk feels massive, than if you're

earning minimum wage; the jump might feel like a necessity and not a risk. There's also this point, though, that there are a lot more averagely intelligent people than there are hyper-intelligent people, so just by sheer numbers alone you're going to get more businesses run by

people with average IQ than you are really intelligent. But back to that original point, it's not the fact that people who are intelligent take less risk; in fact, it's quite the opposite. A 2015 brain scan experiment revealed something counterintuitive: when participants were put through a driving

Simulation with amnesties researchers discovered that more intelligent individuals were actually more likely to take risks. Brain scans showed that these quick decision-makers had significantly more white matter, the neural highway that enables rapid decision processing. Those who took the risk did not hesitate.

But the researchers also noticed something else: those who identified as being skilled drivers took that gamble. If we come back to the placebo study from before, the way the lucky events panned out was that, if a simulation encountered a lucky event, they needed the specific skill set

to be able to act on them. You have to have the required skills, and these have to be learned. Sadly, many failed during this learning process, with tragic consequences. It takes brains to take risks. How could this point around education and risk-taking be stopping smart people from getting wealthy? It

reminds me of this quote: it goes something like, "An expert is a person who is afraid to learn anything new because then he wouldn't be an expert anymore." We all get really comfortable in our circle of competence. No one wants to push themselves; no one wants to step outside

of their comfort zone and feel like a beginner again. But it's nearly 2025, and if you're looking to do something next year to level yourself up, I would encourage you to learn about a topic outside but adjacent to your circle of competence. Skills stack on top of each

other in compound to produce huge returns. The link between finance and me learning to use a camera and edit might not have been all that clear, but now we sit here with this YouTube channel, don't we? What can learning about AI do for an HR professional? What can improving

Public speaking, for a doctor, adjacent skills can transform and impact your current ones. I've learned in life that basically all you need to be is 1% better than your peers, and you get all the rewards: the promotions, the pay rises.

Whatever. The winner takes it all, and the difference between pole position and just staying in your current position is often a few percentage points, a fraction of a second sometimes; yet all the glory goes to the winner. Take a chance, a risk at learning something outside of your

sphere of knowledge. Become a beginner again; it's really fun, it's pretty humbling, but then bring that into your expert world and watch how skill stacking in that way is a 2 + 2 = 10 activity. The learning never stops.

Below in the description, I put together a list of what I see as some of the most high-value skills that you can learn in 2025 and beyond. Intelligent people love to be experts; your challenge, though, is to become a perpetual beginner. Intelligence

isn't about having all the answers all the time; it's about being brave enough to ask new questions, to take calculated risks, to learn new skills, and to embrace the discomfort of not knowing, because in that space of vulnerability, that's where true growth happens.

Twelve months ago, someone posted this on the Deep Thoughts subreddit: 'Many intelligent people with doubts and uncertainties are overlooked in favor of less intelligent people who seem sure of themselves.' I'm going to speak about being a YouTuber here, not because I think it's the

Pinnacle of success, quite the opposite, but because it's where my perspective comes from first of all, and I think there are some parallels to other areas of life. So first things first: the people on YouTube who are successful in any given niche—pick any niche—are almost

never the best at what they do. They're just simply the ones who had the confidence to pick up a camera and slap whatever they made on the internet. Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? This idea that when you start a skill, you see rapid improvement in your

ability at the beginning, as you go from knowing nothing to something, and then this leads to overconfidence. Eventually, you reach a point where you realize, 'Hold on, there's a lot more to this than I thought,' and your confidence in your own ability declines, even though you know more

than you did when you were confident in yourself. If I made a video today that looked like the ones I made when I first started this channel, I wouldn't post it. I shudder every time I see them; the quality is so bad. But those videos were

successful. People still watch them today, but what I see as acceptable has risen to the point where now I often hold myself back. If I make more content, I earn more money, but I make a whole video and then I scrap it because I don't think it's right, wasting a week's worth

of effort on my part and all the money I spend on editing it and stuff. I once made a video where I needed a Matthew McConaughey voice-over thing, you know, as you do doing finance content. The reason is, if you use a clip from the Oscars, they

A copyright strike could take all the money the video earns, so I paid an impersonator on Fiverr to do some voiceover work. But it just wasn't quite right, so in the end I just used a clip from the Oscars.  Anyway, nothing...

for the video again. That took about a week to make; well, that was a waste of money. Yeah, thanks for that, Matt. DJ Lu and MC N are going to do pretty well out of this video as well. Maybe you can relate: perfectionism, imposter syndrome,

that feeling that your work isn't good enough, or an addiction to bad baseline... bad baseline... whatever it is. All of these are traits that register higher the further up the expertise scale you go. A PhD in economics can feel less certain about the future of digital

currencies than a 19-year-old lad who just listened to an hour-long podcast on the topic. The blind confidence of that young lad could lead him to throw a load of money into a meme token, get lucky, and become a millionaire instantly. Everyone then studies the strategies of this

genius kid.  The PhD finance professional goes, 'Hold on, there are a few flaws to his strategy here,' and the feedback will be, 'Well, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?' There are so many elements to this question, so many bits that we could talk about. This whole

intelligence and wealth thing... I could have spoken about this for hours, honestly. I mean, I probably have by the time this is done, but I don't think I've done the topic justice. But let's not think about that too much, otherwise this thing will never see the light of day. Let's just

Focus on the practical steps. Luck is a huge factor in success, but it's those with the skills to grab a lucky event when it happens that benefit. Financial literacy is the first skill; it improves life outcomes and allows you to pounce on opportunity when it presents itself.

I've created a playlist; I'll link it below. That's just a collection of my videos that I think talk about the basics of finance. Then, beyond that, you need to continually improve and update your skill set. The best thing is, a little bit of a new skill can really

help your expert skill. A little bit of an understanding of AI can really benefit your HR expertise, say. Finally, understand that self-doubt, imposter syndrome, perfectionism—these are common in people who consider themselves experts. And when you find yourself

having those negative thought patterns, try and remind yourself that a lack of confidence can be a sign of higher competence. The more I know, the more I realize I need to know. I've got a checklist that I put together of things that you can do; in the comments, steps that

you can follow to try and get past perfectionism and those negative thought processes when they start creeping in. It's all shared on my website, Financial Interest. Again, I'll link everything below for you. There is a final factor, though, that I want to discuss—a really

simple one: you need to care about being rich. Some people just don't care about becoming wealthy, so they won't. That's probably, you know, the right way to be, to be honest, but on the basis that you clicked this video, maybe you do. So watch!

This video's next, where I show you that you're probably richer than you think you are. [Music]

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?

Damien Talks Money

The video explores the question of why some people are wealthy while others are not.

Academic research into wealth disparity is discussed.

The video introduces the idea that luck is a significant factor in wealth accumulation.

A visual analogy using pasta is used to illustrate the uneven distribution of wealth globally.

The limitations of intelligence and hard work in explaining extreme wealth are highlighted.

A study by Alexandre Pillo on the impact of skills and luck on wealth is presented.

The video challenges the notion that success is solely based on skill and hard work.

A Swedish study showing the correlation between intelligence and earnings plateaus above a certain income level is mentioned.

The influence of birth circumstances and background on wealth accumulation is discussed.

The presenter shares a personal anecdote about how unexpected events and opportunities influenced their own success.

The video reiterates the significant role of luck in achieving substantial wealth.

The video shifts focus to strategies for improving one's chances of financial success.

A sponsored segment showcasing an ergonomic chair is included.

A quiz on financial literacy is presented.

The limitations of traditional education in ensuring financial success are discussed.

The importance of time and compounding wealth are highlighted.

The concept of lifestyle creep and its impact on savings are explained.

The video discusses the relationship between intelligence, risk-taking, and wealth.

A study suggesting that the top 1% of earners are less intelligent than those below them is presented, along with the nuance of risk aversion.

The video explains how high-paying jobs often involve less risk-taking compared to entrepreneurship.

The role of sheer numbers in the success of businesses run by people with average IQs is discussed.

A brain scan experiment showing that intelligent individuals are more likely to take risks is mentioned.

Expanding Your Skillset and Embracing New Challenges

The importance of continuous learning and expanding one's skillset is emphasized.

The concept of skill stacking and its potential for significant returns is explained.

The idea of being only 1% better than peers and the rewards it brings is highlighted.

The video encourages viewers to take risks and learn new skills outside their comfort zone.

A list of high-value skills to learn is promised in the description.

Overcoming Perfectionism and Imposter Syndrome

The video discusses the challenges of perfectionism and imposter syndrome.

The Dunning-Kruger effect and its relevance to confidence and competence are explained.

The presenter shares personal experiences with self-doubt and the impact on content creation.

The video discusses how perfectionism and imposter syndrome are common among experts.

The contrast between the blind confidence of a novice and the self-doubt of an expert is highlighted.

The video summarizes practical steps for achieving financial success.

A playlist on the basics of finance is mentioned.

The importance of continuous skill improvement and updating one's skillset is reiterated.

A checklist for overcoming perfectionism and negative thought patterns is offered.

The importance of caring about becoming wealthy is emphasized.