have organized into phases, lessons, and chapters. The phases are:
1. Are You Mentally Prepared to Be an Investor?
2. What Type of Investor Do You Want to Become?
3. How Do You Build a Strong Business?
4. Who Is the Sophisticated Investor?
5. Giving It Back.
This book is written as a guide. It will not give you specific answers. The
purpose of this book is to help you understand what questions to ask. And if this
book does that, it has done its job. Rich dad said, “You cannot teach someone to
be a sophisticated investor. But a person can learn to become a sophisticated
investor. It’s like learning to ride a bicycle. I cannot teach you to ride a bicycle,
but you can learn to ride a bicycle. Learning to ride a bicycle requires risk, trial
and error, and proper guidance. The same is true with investing. If you do not want
to take risks, then you’re saying you do not want to learn. And if you do not want
to learn, then I cannot teach you.”
If you’re looking for a book on hot investment tips, or how to get rich quick,
or the secret investment formula of the rich, this book is not for you. This book is
really about learning more than investing. It is written for people who are students
of investing, students who seek their own path to wealth rather than look for the
easy road to wealth.
This book is about rich dad’s five phases of development, the five phases that
he went through and that I am currently going through. If you are a student of great
wealth, you may notice while reading this book that rich dad’s five phases are the
same five phases that the richest business people and investors in the world went
through in order to become very, very rich. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft;
Warren Buffet, America’s richest investor; and Thomas Edison, founder of
General Electric, all went through these five phases. They are the same five phases
that the young new millionaires and billionaires of the Internet or the “dot com”
generation are currently going through while still in their twenties and thirties. The
only difference is that because of the Information Age, these young people went
through the same phases faster . . . and maybe so can you.
Are You Part of the Revolution?
Great wealth, vast fortunes, and mega-rich families were created during the
Industrial Revolution. The same is going on today during the Information
Revolution.
I find it interesting that today we have self-made multi-millionaires and
billionaires who are twenty, thirty, and forty years of age; yet we still have people
forty and over having a tough time hanging on to $50,000-a-year jobs. One reason
causing this great disparity is the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information
Age.When we shifted into the Industrial Age, people like Henry Ford and Thomas
Edison became billionaires. Today, shifting into the Information Age, we have Bill
Gates, Michael Dell, and the founders of the Internet companies becoming young
millionaires and billionaires. These twenty-somethings will soon be passing Bill
Gates—who is old at 39—in wealth. That is the power of a shift in ages, the shift
from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. It has been said that there is
nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come . . . and there is nothing so
detrimental than someone who is still thinking old ideas.
For you, this book may be about looking at old ideas and possibly finding new
ideas for wealth. It may also be about a paradigm shift in your life. It may be about
a transition as radical as the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. It
may be about you defining a new financial path for your life. It may be about
thinking more like a businessperson and investor rather than an employee or a
self-employed person.
It took me years to go through the phases, and in fact, I am still going through
them. After reading this book, you may consider going through the same five
phases or you may decide that this developmental path is not for you. If you
decide to embark upon the same path, how fast you choose to go through these
five phases of development is up to you. Remember that this book is not about
getting rich quickly. The choice to undergo such a personal development and
education program begins in phase one . . . the phase of mental preparation.
Are You Mentally Prepared to Be an Investor?
Rich dad often said, “Money will be anything you want it to be.”
What he meant was that money comes from our minds, our thoughts. If a
person says, “Money is hard to get,” it will probably be hard to get. If a person
says, “Oh I’ll never be rich,” or “It’s really hard to get rich,” it will probably be
true for that person. If a person says, “The only way to get rich is to work hard,”
then that person will probably work hard. If the person says, “If I had a lot of
money, I would put it in the bank because I wouldn’t know what to do with it,”
then it will probably happen just that way. You’d be surprised how many people
think and do just that. And if a person says, “Investing is risky,” then it is. As rich
dad said, “Money will be anything you want it to be.”
Rich dad warned me that the mental preparation needed to become a
sophisticated investor was probably similar to the mental preparation it would take
to climb Mt. Everest, or to prepare for the priesthood. He was kidding, yet he was
putting me on notice that such an undertaking was not to be taken lightly. He said
to me, “You start as I did. You start without any money. All you have is hope and
a dream of attaining great wealth. While many people dream of it, only a few
achieve it. Think hard and prepare mentally because you are about to learn to
invest in a way that very few people are allowed to invest. You will see the
investment world from the inside rather than from the outside. There are far easier
paths in life and easier ways to invest. So think it over and be prepared if you
decide this is the path for your life.”
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