PNTV: Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki (#31)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do another great book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. As always, we've got a great book. We've got The Philosopher's Notes 6 page PDF with, I don't know, maybe a dozen of my favorite big ideas from the book. This book has sold some crazy number of copies, I don't know, 25 million plus in the rich dad, Poor dad series. I actually really dig Kiyosaki's style. He's funny, he gets to the point and it's good stuff. Now, I'm not going to focus on the kind of hardcore economic how to handle your money kind of issues. The basic end of that story is you need to invest in assets and not invest in liabilities. And that one of the biggest misconceptions we have is that a home, which is producing expenses for us month in, month out, we tend to think of as an asset. He says, no, that's a liability. And we need to look at assets as things that produce income for us. And when we tie up a lot of money in our homes, we basically tie ourselves into, lock ourselves into a job that we may not love and we're working to pay the bills rather than doing what we love to do. And there's a huge opportunity cost to that. I talk about it a little bit in the note, obviously get the book to check it out more. What I want to talk about are some of the consciousness issues, some of the psychology issues, some of the emotional issues around wealth that he gets into. But the basic idea, rich dad, poor dad. He was raised by his biological father who had a negative relationship to money. He was a, I believe he was like a university professor or something and he thought money was bad. And then he had a rich dad who was his best friend's dad. He was one of the wealthiest guys in Hawaii who taught him how to create wealth and how to circulate wealth. And he was one of the wealthiest guys in Hawaii. So you juxtapose rich dad and poor dad, and that's what the book is all about. That's what the series is all about. As you know, if you've read the book. But the basic idea is what does it take for us to have a wealth consciousness, a riches consciousness? And that's what I want to look at. One of the big ideas they talk about is the fact that you can have two different forms of money psychosis. You can have an aversion to money, right? You can not want to talk about money. At all. Or you can have an attachment to money. All you want is money. You do everything so you can make more money, can have more of the bling or whatever it is you think you want. Material wise, you can be attached or you can avoid. Buddhism talks about the same thing, aversion and attachment. The healthy path is the middle path. It's the one that is neither attached or avoiding. So. So he says you're just as psychotic if you're avoiding money as if you were attached to money. They're both equally psychotic. So we want to find a healthy relationship to money, which is one of the reasons why I'm excited to profile these. I have maybe 10 or 12 of these notes in the hundred collection is to come back to this idea that money is neutral. It's simply energy. How do we circulate it more and more consciously and form a more healthy relationship with money? And he says what all the authors say, that the relationship we have to money starts with our relationship to ourselves. Our thoughts are going to create ultimately our wealth. And he says exactly that. He says going into fear, going into our fear and confronting our greed, our weakness, our neediness is the way out. And the way out is through the mind by choosing our thoughts. So we talk about this again and again and again and again. Stephen Covey's Habit number one, be proactive. The first lines of the Dhammapada. In Buddhism, our lives are shaped by what we think. We've got to have control over the contents of our consciousness. That's what Mihaly Csiksikszentmihalyi says in his great book Flow. All the great traditions are about that being able to shape our minds and being able to consciously direct our thoughts in the direction we want to direct them, away from fear and greed and other weak thoughts that we have and toward more healthy, conscious thoughts, which we're going to talk about here. So I go into, as I mentioned, some of the details economically that are some of the principles in this book. I mentioned briefly, opportunity costs. So this was one of my favorite subjects at ucla. I studied psychology and business. I got a minor in business and I majored in psychology. So in business, studied accounting and all this stuff in economics. One of my favorite ideas is this idea of opportunity costs. So when we spend money on something, there are more than just the cost associated to that thing. There's the opportunity cost of what we didn't buy, what we didn't invest our time in or our money in or our energy in. So he likes to say pay Attention to your opportunity costs. And specifically, when you're putting, say, $100,000 or $150,000 or $200,000 down on a home that you want to buy, or 10,000 or 20,000, 50,000, whatever it is, and then you have a mortgage that you're required to meet month in, month out, there's an opportunity cost to that investment. Right. And oftentimes we put all of our money into that investment that we think is an asset that he would say is a liability. And the opportunity cost is huge because we can't go to Bali for a year or two or we can't start the business we've always dreamt of because we've put all of our money over here, which is producing expenses rather than income for us. So it's something to pay attention to. Again, I talk about it more here and more in the book. It's a big idea. We want to pay attention to how we're investing our energy moment to moment to moment. And see, is there a more conscious way I can invest my time and energy? But the idea that I want to focus more on here is fear. So he says that in his work, what he's seen again and again and again is, is that it's fear that holds us back more than anything else, and we need to reorient ourselves to fear if we want to create wealth. So I want to talk about some of the ideas that we have here that I'm passionate about around fear. You can check out the note for his thoughts and quotes on it. But there are a couple of big things. One we talked about in the Big Leap video. Fear isn't going to go away. It's not like we're ever going to get to a point where we're completely fearless. Right? That's just not smart. Aristotle, we talked about this many times. Aristotle says that courage is the virtuous mean between two vices, one vice of deficiency and one vice of excess. Courage is the virtuous mean. The vice of deficiency is cowardice. You don't have enough courage. The vice of excess is you have too much courage. You're rash. That's like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. It's a stupid thing to do. You need to have a certain amount of fear. We have a certain amount of fear in our lives. We have courage to move through them, really powerful. We don't get locked into the vice of deficiency of cowardice. Gay Hendricks in the Big Leap says, look, our fears are always going to be there. Where are they going to go. The issue is we want to wave at them. We want to have a healthy relationship with it. And then we can consciously choose to move through our fears. We don't want to suppress them and repress them and pretend like we're just fearless. We're not. We also don't want to crawl up into a corner and become helpless in the face of challenges. We want to have an appropriate relationship to fear. So that's really cool. Aristotle. A couple of other things on this. I forget who the author was. Paul Bunyan. I don't know if it was Paul Bunyan. Some. Bunyan wrote a book called Pilgrim's Progress. And his hero has a shield, right? His hero is fighting all these evil creatures and whatnot in his story. And he has a shield that makes him invincible with one condition. He has to approach his fear. He has to approach that which is attacking him directly. If he does so and he keeps the shield in front of him, he's invincible. The shield makes him literally invulnerable to any threat. He's invincible. The. But if he runs away from his fear and runs the other direction, he's exposed. And then he can be attacked and then he can be killed. Really cool ideas. We want to move toward our fears. Emerson, I quote here. He says, always, always, always, always, always, always, always. And he literally says that many always, always do that which you're afraid to do. And the death of fear is certain. That particular thing you're afraid of. If you continually stretch yourself and go for it, go toward it, go for it, toward it, that stress, that fear will dissolve and you'll have a new place of power. T Harv Ecker says our wealth zone is equal to our comfort zone. We've got to be willing to stretch ourselves and go toward our fear. One other big idea here. Two more. Fear is excitement without the breath. Remember we talked about that with the Big Leap. Fritz Perl says that fear is excitement without the breath. Another thing we can think of is fear is just a negative expectation, right? And what we need to do is reorient ourselves and imagine a positive expectation. I'm actually not going to have time to get into this right now. I'm going to come back to it in another TV episode. But really cool idea about that. That fear is something we can look at differently with our expectations. I'll get to that some other time. He's got a good idea on focus, which is really cool. Not balancing yourself, but focusing your energy on one project. That's how you create wealth. And then also giving. He says, look, anything you want in your life, focus on giving it to the world. Give, give, give, give, give. Whether it's more love you want, more courage, more creativity, more wealth and abundance, think about how you can give those things to people in your life. That's how we create more of it. Really big idea. So there you go. Really quick, meandering look at a few of my favorite big ideas from rich dad, poor dad. Hope you dug it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.