Work To Learn—Don’t Work For Money

Study Session for Chapter Six, Part One of Two

The following quotes have been taken from the sixth chapter of Rich Dad, Poor Dad and form the foundation of the discussion points for this chapter. These quotes are not meant to be debated, which means that you are not supposed to agree or disagree with them. Rather, their meaning is supposed to be explored. What does Robert Kiyosaki mean by these statements.

I have written my thoughts about each quote below. If you would like, please look at the following statements first and formulate your own thoughts/responses to them before reading the ones I have written. Feel free to either leave your thoughts in the comments below, or turn your reactions into a post and share the link to your post with me here.

Quotations

1 Job security meant everything to my educated dad. Learning meant everything to my rich dad.
2 I am constantly shocked at how little talented people earn.
3 There is an old cliché that goes: ‘Job is an acronym for “Just Over broke.”’ Unfortunately, that applies to millions of people.
4 I recommend to young people to seek work for what they will learn, more than what they will earn.
5 Life is much like going to the gym. The most painful part is deciding to go. Once you get past that, it’s easy.
6 The world is filled with talented poor people. All too often, they’re poor or struggle financially or earn less than they are capable of, not because of what they know, but because of what they do not know.
7 Being technically specialized has its strengths as well as its weaknesses.
8 Giving money is the secret to most great wealthy families.

My Thoughts

1 Job security meant everything to my educated dad. Learning meant everything to my rich dad.

To a certain extent, everyone wants to be rich, or rich enough to not have to worry about money. Robert’s educated dad (otherwise known as his poor dad) appears to have been no exception to this, but he took a specialization approach to learning. He believed that the further he specialized in a field, the more valuable he would be to his employer. By being valuable, he felt that his job would be secure, and to him, nothing was more important than job security.

At first glance, there doesn’t really seem to be anything wrong with that, and depending on one’s goals, there isn’t anything wrong with that. Job security is an important thing to consider. Likewise, though, everyone needs to remember that anything can happen at any time, and even secure jobs can suddenly come to an end.

The reason why Robert’s rich dad valued learning (developing a shallow knowledge base of many fields) was twofold. On the one hand, a broad knowledge and a broad skill base will be transferrable to many positions. This will give one opportunities that he/she won’t have if he/she is too specialized or overqualified. On the other hand, if one wants to be in a leadership position, or hopes to be a successful entrepreneur, one is most likely going to need a variety of skills to be successful in both of these areas. This is why Robert’s rich dad valued learning over job security.

If you are always learning a new skill or a new profession, the idea here is that you will not only have more employment opportunities than a well educated and highly specialized person will, you will most likely also be able to see opportunities that highly specialized persons cannot, and you may or may not be better able to lead, manage, and/or teach/train people better because of your various experiences.

What Robert is hints at with this quote is that, had he followed his educated dad’s advice, he may have become rich doing what he was doing right out of college. But he always would have been at the mercy of his employer. If the company he worked for had laid him off at some point in the future, he would have had to hope that another company in the same industry was willing to hire him. And if he were able to find a job in the same field, he suggests that he probably would have had to settle for less money than he was previously making because he most likely would have been overqualified for the position that was available to him.

In other words, Kiyosaki is saying that when you work to learn, you not only create more opportunities for yourself in the traditional sense of receiving work through an employer, you add skills to your entrepreneurial tool belt, and these skills will add to your chances of being successful if go freelance or start your own business further down the road.

Robert’s advice, like his rich dad’s advice, is to learn a little bit about a lot of things rather than learning a lot about only a few things.

2 I am constantly shocked at how little talented people earn.

The underlying idea behind this statement is that people should be compensated in relation to their degree of talent. Said in another way, if a person’s talent is at the 100% level, their monetary compensation should also be in the 100th percentile. If their talent level is only 20%, their compensation should only be in the 20th percentile. Unfortunately, though, this is not the way things work.

If you only have a talent of 20% and you can get a pay rate from the 90th percentile for that talent, you will, right? I think just about anybody would. There is nothing surprising about that. What is shocking, though, is that large numbers of people who have a talent ranking of 80, 90, or even 100 percent often settle for being compensated for their great talent at very low rates.

In this chapter, Kiyosaki writes that Most people are just one skill away from making a lot more money. What that one skill is will probably vary from person to person, but Kiyosaki suggests that in many cases the missing skill is related to marketing and sales. If you are talented, but nobody knows about your talent, your talent will most likely just go to waist. Or, if you are talented but you don’t know how to negotiate your worth, your talent will most likely be undervalued and you will probably make much less money than you could otherwise be making.

3 There is an old cliché that goes: ‘Job is an acronym for “Just Over broke.”’ Unfortunately, that applies to millions of people.

I think you could unpack this acronym and apply it to different aspects of society in many ways, but Kiyosaki seems to be using it to address the fact that while many people are working hard, they are barely getting by. Even though they have a job, they are Just Over Broke.

I’m sure that Kiyosaki would attribute a lot of the reasons for why this is to poor financial decisions like poor spending habits and a lack of financial education that leads to making bad investments and falling into debt. However, as he points out in this chapter, two other reasons why people who work all of their lives are just over broke is that one, their employers have a tendency to pay them just enough so that they do not quit their jobs, and two, many people do not know how to advocate for themselves so that they get paid what they should be paid.

I think this acronym is being included in this study section to drive home what Kiyosaki appears to strongly feel, and that is that working for other people will never be as lucrative as working for yourself, and/or having your wealth work for you.

4 I recommend to young people to seek work for what they will learn, more than what they will earn.

This quote is another way of saying, Think long term and not short term. Yes, a better paying job will give you more money in the immediate future, but a job that teaches you a new skill will give you something that you will not only have for as long as you live, it may also open doors that lead to even more money and wealth in the long run than the better paying job has to offer.

If you apply this way of thinking to becoming an entrepreneur, it is easy to see that consciously taking jobs that will help you improve and develop the things you aren’t good at doing will have greater benefits for you down the road than a little extra money will.

5 Life is much like going to the gym. The most painful part is deciding to go. Once you get past that, it’s easy.

If you want to be wealthy, you have to be disciplined, and this may mean having to learn how to do things that you don’t like to do. On the contrary, it might also mean having to give up doing things that you like to do. Either way, being disciplined is easy once you set your mind to it. Just like going to the gym is easy to do once you have decided to go there, so is becoming wealthy and becoming successful at life (according to Kiyosaki).

In his book, Kiyosaki suggests that there are often simple steps we can take to greatly improve our financial situations and chances of success. The problem is that, often, we aren’t willing to take them.

As an example, he tells the story of a journalist whom he suggests should study sales and marketing if she truly wants to become a Best Selling Author. Feeling like working in sales and learning how to market her own products is beneath her, the journalist chooses not to study sales and marketing and, we can assume, never becomes the Best Selling Author that she wanted to be as a result.

6 The world is filled with talented poor people. All too often, they’re poor or struggle financially or earn less than they are capable of, not because of what they know, but because of what they do not know.

Following a strong theme in this chapter, this quote seems to reaffirm the idea that many people are just one skill away from making much more money. Not knowing this one skill, and in many cases not being willing to take the simple steps that are required to learn this one skill, is what is essentially keeping them in the poor house.

7 Being technically specialized has its strengths as well as its weaknesses.

Obviously, if you have a special skill that few people can do as well as you, you will be able to demand higher pay or extra benefits. The problem with being highly specialized, though, is that if your company suddenly decides that it doesn’t need you anymore, or the services that you provide begin to have less demand, what will you do? You will lose your job and the only skills that you have will now have less value, so you will have pigeon holed yourself, in a sense.

For anyone who is technically specialized, Kiyosaki strongly suggests joining a union. That way, should you lose your job, or should the market feel that your specialized skill is worth less than it used to be, you will have a group of people to fight and negotiate with.

8 Giving money is the secret to most great wealthy families.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really understand what Kiyosaki was getting at with this quote. It’s easy to speculate that maybe there are tax/corporate benefits that can be gained by giving to charity and that this quote is referring to those things, but I got more of a feeling that Kiyosaki is talking about an attitude that great wealthy families have toward money, an attitude that doesn’t treat money as something that should be hoarded, but rather as something that should be exchanged and given freely to worthy causes and projects.

Like I said, I really don’t understand what he is referring to here. Maybe some of you will be able to shed some light on the subject for me.

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This concludes the first half of the study session for chapter six. Thank you for joining me.

If you would like to participate in this book club, buy or download a copy of Richard Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and read it along with me. Each chapter is followed by a study session. I plan to read this book slowly, and to thoroughly explore each study session. I would love to do so in the company of others.

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Good discussion promotes deeper understanding and helps to reveal new and original ideas.

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I hope to write a post that explores the second half of the study session for Chapter 6 some time next week. If you would like to know when that post has been published, please let me know in the comments below and I will send you a link to the new post.

For those of you who missed the study sessions for chapters one, two, three, four, and five, you can find them by following the links below.

Chapter One: Part 1/2 | Chapter One: Part 2/2

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Chapter Two: Part 1/2 | Chapter Two: Part 2/2

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Chapter Three: Part 1/2 | Chapter Three: Part 2/2

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Chapter Four: Part 1/2 | Chapter Four: Part 2/2

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Chapter Five: Part 1/2 | Chapter Five: Part 2/2