After a sports injury sidelined me from high school life, my parents gave me control of my bar mitzvah gift money of roughly $12,000, thinking I’d lose it all in the stock market.

Instead I studied endlessly, became a master stock trader and turned my $12k into nearly $2 million by the time I graduated college and started a hedge fund.

I’ve always had a big mouth, so by showing off my rather blessed life in the hit reality show Wall Street Warriors, I began getting 50, 100, 200 emails/day from people who also wanted to get rich in the stock market.

So I made the odd choice of closing my hedge fund to start a media company focused on educating people on how to get rich in the stock market. Just like I did.

The financial education industry is full of snake oil salesmen — marketers preying on the naive — but I knew if I could pass down my self-taught lessons to my students, I could cut through the BS and actually create millionaires from scratch. And I would be rewarded for my honesty and teachings.

At first, nobody believed I could do it — they thought I must’ve been lucky or a fraud, while I knew my success was due to strategy and hours upon hours spent mastering my art … and that strategy could be passed down to others.

Six years into my teaching journey I have thousands of students, most of whom are too lazy and undisciplined to follow my instructions, but I have successfully created two millionaire students — one of whom started with just $1,500 to his name and has now turned it into $1.7 million in three years as my student.

I now earn millions of dollars per year from teaching others, and I still actively trade stocks — I’m up 92% in the first three months of 2014 alone. My success depends on my students’ success, and we all win if I do my job right.

Here are my five top tips for becoming wealthy within a few years, just as I did and my students are now doing too:

Find a subject you’re passionate about, and learn every single thing about it so you become an expert. It doesn’t matter if you love art, music, sports, finance, business, design, entertainment, food and travel or even poetry — and it also doesn’t matter if your friends, family and common sense all tell you there’s no money to be made from it. Follow your heart, work your butt off becoming a master at whatever it is that you love, and you will be rewarded financially as there’s tremendous value in expertise. Thanks to the internet and how developed our society has become, you really can master pretty much anything for free or very cheaply, no major institution or fancy degree required.

Find a way to prove that you’re a true master at your subject, whether it’s by performing publicly, competing in tournaments, on websites, getting featured in the press, writing about your knowledge or showing it off in YouTube videos and Instagram pictures to make the entire civilised world recognise your expertise first-hand.

Partner with like-minded or similarly talented people who share your passion to reinforce your expertise as a pair or group. There’s more value in teamwork than going solo in the world (i.e., what happens if you get hit by a bus?)

Devise a plan to sell your individual or group expertise, whether it’s by opening an online academy (like me), charging for your time, effort or performance and see what non-masters in your subject are willing to pay and what makes you, your team and your customers the happiest.

Refine your plan and always explore new angles to show your mastery and help your non-expert customers be more successful. By helping others become experts at anything, you’re not only doing good in the world, you will get very wealthy very quickly.

This article was originally published on Ask Men and is republished here with permission.

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