Rich Dad and Poor Dad - Page 4

On January 30 2009 06:12 StRyKeR wrote:
I had two dads who played SC. One was a noob, the other was a pro. I've had many discussions with both of them, and frankly, it's been hard to decide for myself what I wanted to do. I've now come to terms with their perspectives.

Noob dad always advocated the "safe" strategy. 12hatch11pool13hatch, 3-hatch spire, 2gate robo-obs, 1rax cc. He looked down upon "cheesers" and said he doesn't "play for wins" -- he plays for "fun". He has Ph.D. in Starcraft and he theorycrafts all day long.

Pro dad was more risk-taking. He sometimes recommended an 8-rax bunker rush, a 2 hatch-spire, even a 1-hatch hydra and 14nex against a zerg, but his playstyle was definitely very colorful. He had this mantra that you shouldn't work so hard just to get wins -- you should make wins work for you. He also had this thing about being "strategically literate". He owns a progaming team and trains the next generation of progamers.

I learned that a lot of people complain about cheese -- "I need a better opponent", "I woulda won ez", etc., when in fact it's really the burden of the middle class players to adapt.

You know you're in this ditch when you constantly think of "playing it safe" and "following the most popular builds". It may be fun to do because everyone is doing it, but you have to be strategically literate. It's a cultural thing. People work hard and practice hard memorizing their favorite progamer builds but always wonder, "How can I win more games? How can I get wins quick? I need some wins... I have a massive win-debt..."

Players that accumulate a great mass of wins all of a sudden often end up in win-debt because they got there by luck.

I mean, if you play cookie-cutter TvZ every single game and you start losing to cheese here and there, is it really their fault for playing the best game possible?

"Win" is an acronym for "whining insecure noob". People who work for the win complain about their win ratios, their APM, their build orders, and their opponents.

Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that gosus know the difference between an asset and a liability. Muta control is a liability in the hands of a noob. Far too often, noobs think that their control is an asset and don't think twice about using their APM purely for muta harassing the Terran main. Only afterwards might he realize that he has 1k min 1k gas in his bank and no lurkers to defend against the Terran ball. Gosus understand this difference.

If you let emotions take over, you will most certainly fail. What? You see more tanks than you had thought? *adds 5 more sunks* Now that was a waste of money wasn't it? You have to let your emotions guide you, not define you. Emotion = energy in motion.

I learned a lot of things from my pro dad.

On January 30 2009 02:38 Phrujbaz wrote:
I advise against this book.

http://johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html

Instead I recommend the millionare next door

On January 30 2009 06:56 hugitout wrote:


thanks for the link i just spent around 3 hours reading that site lol

On January 30 2009 03:15 zizou21 wrote:


stopped reading. in all seriousness, this book sounds like pure drivel

On January 30 2009 04:39 itzme_petey wrote:
The book is normally paired togeather with a motivational conference that is held in major cities. Essentially, they try to get you to pay into becoming real estate agents or to buy forclosed properties and turn them for a profit.

I feel that after speaking with people who are wealthy, there is no pattern between these folks. We are in love with the concept that we can create massive amounts of wealth (Millions/Billions, not upper middle class) through a formula (business strategies) or by following a path (college). Its always good to be in a competitve position (education, training) but theres more to it. Whether it is getting an executive job or opening your own business, luck has a strong factor in the equation.

I feel that rich people (or very successful businesses) are outliers or at the very top of a bell curve. Its a natural occurence. Yet, we look to them as examples (formula steps) of how to get rich, while in fact they are just lucky that events worked out in their favor. Most of their decisions are solid logical decisions, while other key decisions just happen to work out in their favor given their situations. Thats my opinion of the matter.

My motto is to do what you are good at, (that does not mean you will get rich, even if you are the best), but if you do get lucky, you will take home the big one. That said, book appeals to the psuedo-intellectual side of people. The concepts are over generalized and are too simple to be accurate.

If I Were a Rich Dad
Why millions buy Rich Dad, Poor Dad's nonsense.
By Rob Walker
Posted Thursday, June 20, 2002, at 12:08 PM ET

Where do Americans get financial advice? Merrill Lynch? CNBC? Or Robert T. Kiyosaki? If you don't know who Robert T. Kiyosaki is, well, you can find him at the top of many a best-seller list. His , is currently No. 1 on the New York Times paperback "advice" chart—a list that it's been on for an astonishing 98 weeks. Spinoffs, including Rich Dad's Guide to Investing and Rich Kid, Smart Kid, also seem to be selling. Obviously there are many, many advice books on the market, financially focused and otherwise, but only a handful turn into franchises. So, why this one?

Interestingly, Rich Dad, Poor Dad was originally self-published in 1997. As Kiyosaki worked the seminar circuit, he sold enough books to get the attention of Warner Business Books, a major publisher with better distribution. The newer edition has sold more than 2 million copies since May 2000 in the United States alone; it's also been translated into other languages and has probably sold five times that amount worldwide. The apparently charming Kiyosaki seems to be his own best sales weapon, and has—of course—appeared on Oprah.

A good chunk of what's actually in the book is self-help boilerplate. First, there's the mandatory declaration that it isn't a get-rich-quick book. Second, there's the repeated claim that "the rich" have "secrets" that led to their success and will herein be revealed. Third, the material is presented as a series of "lessons." And fourth, those lessons are positioned as being counterintuitive revelations that effectively undercut various popular "myths." The book's back cover promises, among other things, that it will "explode the myth that you need to earn a high income to become rich."

But to generate the word-of-mouth that turns an advice book into a phenomenon you need a gimmick, and Kiyosaki's can be found in the title. Growing up in Hawaii in the 1950s, he writes, he had "two fathers," each with a very different attitude about money. (The book was written "with" Sharon L. Lechter, but is told entirely from Kiyosaki's first-person point of view.) Eventually he makes it clear that "Poor Dad" is his actual father, an educator who worked like a dog all his life and basically ended up broke. Then there was his buddy Mike's father: a shrewd entrepreneurial sort who eventually built an "empire" and became "one of the richest men in Hawaii" (no further details are offered) via his keen understanding of money. This is "Rich Dad," the man Kiyosaki says he decided, at age 9, to emulate. And it worked! Today Kiyosaki says he's a rich man himself, all because of the wisdom of Rich Dad, here boiled down to six easy lessons. Kiyosaki periodically interrupts his disjointed narrative to complain that American schools do a bad job of teaching elementary personal finance, and positions himself as "a socially responsible teacher who is deeply concerned with the widening gap between the haves and have-nots."

This is pretty much the ideal package: the fablelike presentation of a personal success story wrapped in the mantle of "education." The parable format is particularly popular these days and has helped other books like Who Moved My Cheese? and Fish. The twist in this case is the blurring of parable and what appears to be autobiography. It's Kiyosaki's accessible, unpretentious storytelling, spiked with mind-over-money tips about avoiding credit-card debt and the like, that makes people buzz about the book—the no-nonsense pose is apparently convincing enough to blot out the nonsense.

Rich Dad's running theme is that you'll never get rich by chasing a higher salary—apparently the Protestant work ethic is for suckers. What you need to do is "concentrate your efforts on only buying income-generating assets." Such as? It turns out that whenever Kiyosaki offers an example from his life, it almost invariably involves real-estate speculation. (It's hard to judge the veracity of his not-very-specific claims on this front, and as far as I can tell, press scrutiny of Kiyosaki to date has been limited to bland interviews or face-value restatements of his book's themes. I did come across a long and withering critique by a real-estate writer named John T. Reed. He questions, among other things, whether Rich Dad even exists.) Not surprisingly, the sunny cover blurbs make no mention of flipping distressed properties for big bucks, since even the least sophisticated book buyer would tend to be skeptical about yet another run at this familiar get-rich-quick scheme.

To pad out the real-estate anecdotes, Kiyosaki repeatedly plugs further learning through more books, audio tapes, courses, and seminars. "I am wealthy and free from needing a job simply because of the courses I took," he announces. You'll be pleased to hear, then, that Kiyosaki himself is doing his part to help the have-nots with events like a $5,000-a-person, three-day program in Phoenix this weekend. The book also touts a board game that he sells through infomercials (the full text of one ad is included in Rich Dad), which in turn plug the book.

However much money Kiyosaki did or didn't make in the past, he's making a fortune by selling the idea that he holds the key to your financial future. In one of the many logically creative passages late in the book, he raises the astonishing idea that Americans don't spend enough time trying to emulate the successful—there's just not enough hero worship out there. "It's one of the most powerful ways we learn that we often lose as adults," he writes. "We lose our heroes. We lose our naivete." If there's better proof of how wrong this is than the success of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I can't think of it.

On January 30 2009 04:00 numberThirtyOne wrote:
The dirty secret most of these people have is that they did not become rich by applying the principles they're selling, they got rich by targetting this unhappy demographic and getting a bunch of them to buy the book/video series/tapes/course that they're selling.

"He explained that the idea of taxes was made popular, and accepted by the majority, by telling the poor and the middle class that taxes were created only to punish the rich. This is how the masses voted for the law, and it became constitutionally legal. Although it was intended to punish the rich, in reality it wound up punishing the very people who voted for it, the poor and middle class."

On January 30 2009 08:37 MaZza[KIS] wrote:
The problem with getting rich is that it relies on two MAIN factors

1. Having the right IDEA
2. Having the right TIMING

Lots and lots and lots and lots of people have the right idea. We can all agree that there is a lot of intelligent people out there with great ideas.

However, to pull them off they need timing... with timing there is an inherent luck factor and ... that's what this book doesn't talk about.

To put it into something relatable... POKER... you can know the theories of poker inside and out, but if your timing is off when you're trying to push a play you're f*cked.

How do you offset this issue of timing? Be constantly in the game. That is, constantly pitch your ideas and wait for the right time. Just like poker, if you always play the best hands, over time, you will win more then you lose (termed as grinding). So, in order to get rich and succesful you have to grind.

Then, my friends, what is a job but a daily grind?

Kiyosaki got lucky... he won the WSOP of commerce, but not every player will be just as lucky and some will have taken more bad beats then they like.

LUCK. No one talks about it, because everyone likes to think it's "they" who are the accomplished, but lady luck is a bitch and she soon teaches you otherwise...

Some of it is vague but he does a good job of outlining the value of money and how that value is different for everyone. It's not about greed as some people in this thread believe, it's about smart money management. I particularly like how he breaks down what is an asset versus a liability (ie your house is a liability because it is a constant money-sink) and how to balance out the two such that you limit liabilities to the degree that your assets overtake them in value, thereby increasing your personal wealth