Rich Dad, Poor Dad Book Club

Chapter One, Study Session Questions

Additional Questions

As in my prior post, I recommend formulating your answers to the following questions before reading my answers (which are written below).

If you feel like putting the Blockchain to work for you, please turn your answers into a post and direct me to it by leaving a link here in the comments. If you don’t have time to make your own post, please feel free to strike up a conversation in the comments section below about any of the following questions and answers.

1. How common is the approach to money taken by Robert’s poor dad?
2. Robert’s rich dad said true learning takes energy, passion, and a burning desire. What are examples of when this has proven true in your life? What’s one lesson you never forgot, and why?
3. Would the pay rate of 10 cents an hour—and then nothing an hour—have stirred in you the same reaction as Robert?
4. Is it fear that drives most people to work? Are there other factors at play?
5. Is the temptation strong to think that more money will soothe that fear? Why is that such a common reaction?
6. What’s an example from your life when you reacted with your emotions? What’s a time when you were able to observe your emotions instead and choose your thoughts?
7. Are the rich or the poor more susceptible to those controlling emotions of fear and greed? Why do you think that is?
8. Do you think most people realize they are stuck in the Rat Race? Why or why not?

My Answers

1: How common is the approach to money taken by Robert’s poor dad?

To clarify for anyone who hasn’t read the book, Robert’s poor dad’s (his biological father’s) approach to money is to play it safe: study hard, get a job with good benefits, and show up day after day, year after year. He believes that good companies and government policies will take care of their workers and the citizens who do what they’re supposed to do. The first chapter doesn’t really talk much about what Robert’s poor dad does with his money or how he approaches it, but it demonstrates that he believes people must work for their money. That may sound obvious, of course people must work for their money, but the point is that Robert’s poor dad’s idea of getting paid is spending your time doing something for someone else who then puts money in your hand.

I would say that the faith in this approach to making money is changing but that a lot of people still follow this path because it often seems like the only real and dependable way to make money. I would also say that, depending on one’s situation and planning, it is often the only option that is available for many people. I say that because many people are already too in need of money to be able to not take this approach. Or, at least, it seems that way to me now, at this point in the book and at this point in my financial journey.

2: Robert’s rich dad said true learning takes energy, passion, and a burning desire. What are examples of when this has proven true in your life? What’s one lesson you never forgot, and why?

When I have been passionate about things, I have found ways to weave them into my free time and my work time. I was once very interested in baking. Not only did I teach myself a lot about baking at home, in my free time, I also began baking bread at work (I worked in a restaurant so it wasn’t very difficult to do this). I then began to really start baking at work and was soon baking all the bread that the restaurant needed, plus more. From there, I got a job at a local French bakery and took baking even further. For a long time I thought I would open my own bakery, but, out of fear, really, I gave up on that dream. Running a bakery seemed like too much work at times in the day that would have ended up keeping me away from my future family while not providing what I thought would be enough security in return.

During this time, I learned an immense amount of things about baking, and the reason why I did was because I was very passionate about bread. I loved eating it, touching it, looking at it, smelling it, making it, and more. Not only the finished product, I was interested in every aspect of its production and ingredients. It was very fun and satisfying for me to bake. I didn’t need to go to school. I didn’t need someone to take me by the hand and show me how to do it. I just needed to follow my instinct and dive right in, which is what I did.

As for lessons I’ve never forgotten, well … the way this question is worded makes me feel like I should talk about a lesson I learned from somebody, but the only lesson that really comes to mind right now is one that I’ve learned over and over again through life. That lesson is that no amount of training or studying can guarantee your success in a real life situation. When I worked in restaurants, I worked with numerous people who had had much more training and schooling than I had, but when they started working, they couldn’t make the simplest of dishes or sauces. Their approach was generally stiff and unnatural. It often didn’t account for the thousands of variables that were affecting them at the moment they were called to action. It always seemed to me that they had been taught only one way of doing things, and that the way they had been taught to do things only worked in a specific situation/environment.

It’s the same with teaching, one can be as prepared to teach as it is physically and mentally possible, but without being able to be flexible, unflustered, adaptive, and intuitive, one will have little chance of being successful in a classroom.

In other words, the lesson here is that every situation is different, and every situation is a learning situation, and to be successful in whatever it is that we do, we must be flexible and adaptive to the forces that are creating the situation we are in. We must also be able to recognize those forces so that we can correctly react to them and adjust to them.

3: Would the pay rate of 10 cents an hour—and then nothing an hour—have stirred in you the same reaction as Robert?

To be honest, I think this is an unfair question. Robert’s reaction was a feeling of incredulousness. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. But he had also been set up to accept this demotion. His rich dad had asked him if he wanted to learn to not work for money. Robert then said that he did, that he wanted to learn to not work for money, so he was no longer in the position to refuse his rich dad’s offer, nor be exasperated by it. He did feel slightly cheated by the final results of working for free, but at the same time, he had been cornered into trusting the motives of his rich dad and I think that I would have felt the same way.

Had I been asked if I wanted to learn how to now work for money, I would have said yes. Then, when pressed with the decision of working for free and learning this mysterious skill, or working for a measly 10 cents an hour and not learning it, I would have bitten my lip and accepted the offer, all the while feeling like I was being cheated slightly.

4: Is it fear that drives most people to work? Are there other factors at play?

Again, I feel like this question is slightly misleading. The meaning of the word work is not very clear. In this question it sounds like the word work is referring to any kind of work (from being an entrepreneur to being an employee), but I think it is specifically referring to a job, a job that a person is not in control of, and a job in which a person’s time and labor is simply exchanged for money.

With this definition of work in mind, I think that doubt is more of a factor than fear. One could argue that doubt is a form of fear, and I don’t think I would disagree with that argument, but doubt still strikes me as being a more appropriate word than fear in this case.

Why do people work for money rather than try to make money from what seems like nothing? Why do people not risk their money to make more money? In some cases, yes, fear is the emotion that holds people back, but more frequently, I think it is doubt. People doubt that they can make a living with passion. They doubt that they have enough time to put into their ideas to make them reality. They doubt that people want the services and products that they have to offer. They doubt that real opportunities are actual opportunities. They doubt their intuition.

So, to answer this question, I would say that doubt and misperceptions about how to make money and who can make money are also factors that drive people to work (exchanging their time and labor directly for money).

In other words, people often don’t believe in themselves. They don’t think of themselves as exceptional people and they believe that only exceptional people are capable of doing the things that make people wealthy.

5: Is the temptation strong to think that more money will soothe that fear? Why is that such a common reaction?

I would say, yes. The temptation to think that more money will help to relieve our worries and insecurities is strong because we often think only of the sum of money and how much we could do with that sum of money. Many people don’t realize that unless we use that money wisely, it will only disappear.

For much of our lives, we’re given the impression that having more money makes things easier. It gives us things, and allows us to live freely. We’re not given the complete picture, which is that money is finite without planning, responsibility, and effort.

6: What’s an example from your life when you reacted with your emotions? What’s a time when you were able to observe your emotions instead and choose your thoughts?

I’ve moved into new apartments and changed jobs many times because of my emotions. Often, I was tired of one thing and so I traded it in for another without much thought or consideration. For a long time, this was a pattern of mine, making emotional decisions that cost me money and put me in new jobs and living arrangements while leaving my emotional outlook and understanding unchanged, which of course meant that no matter where I ended up I felt the need to make a change and often repeated the same poor emotional decisions that had led me to where I was.

7: Are the rich or the poor more susceptible to those controlling emotions of fear and greed? Why do you think that is?

Well, knowing that people are people, I find it tempting to say that both the rich and the poor are equally susceptible to the controlling emotions of fear and greed.

I think that personality, upbringing, education, and experience are factors that will have more of an impact on whether or not people are susceptible to the effects of fear and greed than their financial situation.

8: Do you think most people realize they are stuck in the Rat Race? Why or why not?

I think this is also more than just a simple yes or no question. I would say that many people think they are in the Rat Race, but that many people have an incorrect perception of what the Rat Race is. In other words, they don’t know how deeply they are entrenched in the Rat Race.

Most people think of the Rat Race as having to worker harder and harder to meet their bills. They think that a pay raise here and there or a better job will free them from the financial strains of their situations. They realize that they often need a car to get to work and that they need a job to pay for the car that takes them to work and they think of this as the Rat Race—never being able to get ahead.

But I would say that not many people realize that being stuck in the Rat Race means believing there is another job or promotion that can solve your problems, or believing that you can make enough money in wages to free yourself of your financial worries. Being in the Rat Race means not seeing the larger picture of how money works. It means not having any investments at all and not pursuing assets that create returns, etc.

So, according to that definition, I would say, no, most people don’t realize that they are stuck in the Rat Race.

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This concludes the second half of the study session for chapter one. 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.

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

I hope to write a post that explores the first half of the study session for Chapter 2 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 first half of this study session, you can find it HERE.