Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About MoneyThat the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!

4. Master a formula and then learn a new one: the power of learning
quickly
In order to make bread, every baker follows a recipe, even if it’s only
held in their head. The same is true for making money.
Most of us have heard the saying, “You are what you eat.” I have a
different slant. I say, “You become what you study.” In other words, be
careful what you learn, because your mind is so powerful that you become
what you put in your head. For example, if you study cooking, you then
tend to cook. If you don’t want to be a cook anymore, then you need to
study something else.
When it comes to money, the masses generally have one basic formula
they learned in school and it’s this: Work for money. The predominant
formula I see in the world is that every day millions of people get up, go to
work, earn money, pay bills, balance checkbooks, buy some mutual funds,
and go back to work. That is the basic formula, or recipe.

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If you’re tired of what you’re doing, or you’re not making enough, it’s
simply a case of changing the formula via which you make money.
Years ago, when I was 26, I took a weekend class called “How to Buy
Real Estate Foreclosures.” I learned a formula. The next trick was to have
the discipline to actually put into action what I had learned. That is where
most people stop. For three years, while working for Xerox, I spent my
spare time learning to master the art of buying foreclosures. I’ve made
several million dollars using that formula.
So after I mastered that formula, I went in search of other formulas. For
many of the classes, I did not directly use the information I learned, but I
always learned something new.
I have attended classes designed for derivative traders, commodity
option traders, and chaologists. I was way out of my league, being in a
room full of people with doctorates in nuclear physics and space science.
Yet, I learned a lot that made my stock and real estate investing more
meaningful and lucrative.
Most junior colleges and community colleges have classes on financial
planning and buying traditional investments. They are good places to start,
but I always search for a faster formula. That is why, on a fairly regular
basis, I make more in a day than many people will make in their lifetime.
Another side note: In today’s fast-changing world, it’s not so much what
you know anymore that counts, because often what you know is old. It is
how fast you learn. That skill is priceless. It’s priceless in finding faster
formulas—recipes, if you will—for making dough. Working hard for
money is an old formula born in the day of cavemen.