You've probably seen someone on TikTok with a camera crew stop a stranger who "looks like money" and asks how they got rich. Usually it just ends with how rich the person is, but this one didn't.

In Monaco, the School of Hard Knocks crew stopped a woman who pointed them to her husband (1) — Portland Holdings Chairman and CEO Michael Lee-Chin, a Jamaican-Canadian investor worth an estimated $1.1 billion (2).

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When the crew asked how much he's worth, he waved it off — "If you know what you're worth, you're not wealthy." Then he listed what he thinks separates the rich from everyone else.

Lee-Chin says rich people became wealthy doing five things. Then he counted four:

they own a few high-quality businesses,

they make sure they understand them,

they make sure those businesses are in strong long-term growth industries

and they hold for the long run.

When the host asked how someone buys a business without much money, Lee-Chin added the fifth: borrow to invest. "I had to borrow to invest," he said. "And I bought a mutual fund management company."

So the full list is this: own a few good businesses you understand, in growing industries, use other people's money prudently and hold them for years. It wasn't an offhand answer, either. His firm, Portland Investment Counsel, has described the same approach for years as his "five laws of wealth creation (3)."

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Lee-Chin got his start from borrowing.

In 1983, when he was 32, Lee-Chin borrowed $500,000 and put it all into one stock: MacKenzie Financial, the fund company he knew well (4). Four years later, that stake had grown about sevenfold. He used the profit to buy AIC, a small Ontario mutual fund firm.

Under him, AIC grew from under $1 million in assets to more than $15 billion (4), and in 2009, he sold its retail fund business to the Canadian financial services giant Manulife Financial (5). He still owns about 60% of National Commercial Bank Jamaica, where much of his fortune sits today.

A couple of Lee-Chin's laws need a closer look, because they're the ones people tend to gloss over.

Borrowing to invest is called leverage, and it works both ways. When his MacKenzie stock rose, the borrowed money multiplied the gain. Had it fallen, he'd have owed the loan on top of the loss. It's a bigger swing either way, which is why it tends to suit investors who can absorb a bad outcome.

His advice to "own just a few" is because he believes in knowing the companies deeply. Lee-Chin studies a small number of companies closely and puts his money there. Most people who can't do that full-time choose diversification instead — for example, a low-cost index fund spreads your money across hundreds of companies in one step.

When the interviewer asked what he's buying now, Lee-Chin named nuclear energy. "Whenever there's a shift in the dominant source of energy, there's a shift in economic power," he said, and he sees that shift moving "towards nuclear (1)." He says the same thing in his own videos, although his firm makes it clear his on-camera comments aren't investment advice (6).

The part of Lee-Chin's list that really carries over is simple: Own a few things you understand, hold them for years and let the returns compound.

That idea works whether you have $500 or $500,000, and for most people, a low-cost index fund is the easiest way to own good businesses without picking each one yourself. In Lee-Chin's story, compounding did most of the work. After that first big bet he made, the gains built on themselves over time.

And he didn't come from money either, if you were wondering. "My mom was an orphan when I was born," he said (1). "We were both adopted because she didn't have a job."

His advice to young people is to earn a different kind of PhD — "poor, hungry, and driven." Do that, he says, and one day your own kids might end up with another kind of PhD: "Papa has dough (1)."

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TikTok (1); Forbes (2); Portlandic (3); Royal Ontario Museum (4); Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (5); Portland Holdings (6)

This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: 'Poor, hungry, driven': Billionaire Michael Lee-Chin says rich people become wealthy by doing 5 simple things

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