“The Business of the 21st Century”: Book Summary
In this book, Robert shows you why you need to build your own business, and exactly what kind of business. But this isn’t just about changing the type of business you’re working with; it’s also about changing you. Welcoming to the business of the 21st century.
Part One: Take Control of Your Future
The rampant decline in gainful employment is a ravaging epidemic to which few are immune. From executives and middle managers to administration employees and blue-collar workers, from bankers to retail clerks, all are at risk. Even the healthcare industry, until recently considered a job-safe zone, is trimming away significant chunks of its workforce. If you want a solid future, you need to create it. You can take charge of your future only when you take control of your income source. You need your own business. According to Robert, a recession is the best time to start your own business. When the economy slows down, entrepreneurialism heats up like a stoked-up wood stove on a cold winter night. When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge. Entrepreneurs don’t really care if the market’s up or down. They’re creating better products and better processes. So when somebody says, “Oh, there’s less opportunity now,” it’s because they’re losers. Entrepreneurial fever has been kicking into high gear because when the economy slows down, entrepreneurial activity heats up. In fact, entrepreneurs flourish in downtimes. In times of uncertainty, we look for other ways to generate income. When we know we can’t rely on employers, we begin to look to ourselves. We start thinking maybe it’s time to break out of our comfort zones and get creative to help make ends meet. The cashflow quadrant represents the different methods by which a cash income is generated. For example, an employee earns money by holding a job and working for someone else or a company. The self-employed are people who earn money working for themselves, either as solo operators or through their own small business. A business owner owns a large business (typically defined as 500 employees or more) that generates money. Investors earn money from their various investments — in other words, money generating more money.
The E Quadrant
The overwhelming majority of us learn, live, love, and leave this life entirely within the E quadrant. Our educational system and culture train us, from the cradle to the grave, in how to live in the world of the E quadrant. The operating philosophy for this world is to go to school, study hard and get good grades, and get a good job with benefits at a great company.
The S Quadrant
The S quadrant includes a huge range of earning power, all the way from the teenage freelance baby sitter or landscaper just starting out in life to the highly paid private-practice lawyer, consultant, or public speaker. The S quadrant can be a thankless and difficult place to live. Everyone picks on you here. The government picks on you — you spend one full day a week just in tax compliance. Your employees pick on you, your customers pick on you, and your family picks on you because you never take any time off.
The B Quadrant
The B quadrant is where people go to create big businesses. The difference between an S business and a B business is that you work for your S business, but your B business works for you. Those who live and work in the B quadrant make themselves recession-proof because they control the source of their own income.
The I Quadrant
Investors earn money from their various investments — in other words, money generating more money
Changing Jobs Is Not Changing Quadrants. The four quadrants are not just four different business structures. It’s even more about four different mindsets.It is a matter of your core financial values. It is these core differences that attract us to or repel us from the different quadrants. E Quadrant Values: Job security S Quadrant Values: Independence B Quadrant Values: Wealth-building I Quadrant Values: Financial freedom. If you want to get rich, you’re going to have to move. You don’t need a new job; you need a new address i.e. to move to different business quadrant!
What defines an entrepreneur: You make things happen. You pull yourself out of the rows of passenger seats, walk to the head of the bus, and get behind the wheel of your life. You need to adopt the mindset of an entrepreneur. That mindset comes down to this: An entrepreneur is self-determining. You make things happen, which means you don’t get to blame anyone or anything outside yourself. It takes a dream, a lot of determination, a willingness to learn quickly, and an understanding of which sector of the cashflow quadrant you’re operating in. Working hard at making money will never create wealth. You can only control the source of your income.t’s not just about having income today, tomorrow, and next week; it’s about securing your income in perpetuity. This is passive income, also known as residual income: income that continues coming in, over and over, long after you finished expending the effort and capital it took to create the source of the income. Shifting yourself into the B quadrant is a strong step in that direction, but not all businesses will create passive income. We found that one business model stood out from the rest. This particular business model creates passive income but requires relatively little cash investment to start up. It has very low overhead and can be operated on a flexible part-time basis until it generates enough cash flow for the entrepreneur to transition out of his current full-time job. That business model is called network marketing.
Part Two: One Business — Eight Wealth-Building Assets
The things that most people think of as assets are not assets at all; in fact,
they’re liabilities. What defines whether something is an asset or a liability is cash flow, not some abstraction of value. In other words, is it generating money that goes into your pocket, or is it taking money out of your pocket? Everything will either make you money or cost you money. If it doesn’t make you money, it’s not an asset, it’s a liability. How much income does your house bring you, month in and month out? So where’s the worth, the actual discretionary income that you can hold in your hands and use to buy or invest in anything you like? It isn’t there: There isn’t any. Your house is not an asset; it’s a liability.it’s a hole in the ground into which you pour money. And even with real estate, you have to understand the difference between cash flow and capital gain. Most people don’t understand this distinction. When they invest, they invest for capital gain. They’ll say, “My house went up in value. My car went up in value.” That’s capital gain, not cash flow. The purpose of owning real estate is to keep it as an asset, not to sell it for a profit. If you buy a piece of real estate for $100,000 and then sell it for $200,000, that’s not an asset; you just generated a $100,000 capital gain. You had to shoot the asset to get that money. You’ve killed the asset. It’s like selling your cow for money. I’d rather own the cow and sell the milk.
Asset #1: A Real-World Business Education
One of the beauties of network marketing is that it pulls away the veil of mystery and starts to show you life in the B quadrant. Network marketing teaches people how to overcome their fears, how to communicate, how to understand the psychology of other people saying “No” to them, and how to maintain persistence in the face of rejection and other real-world challenges. Here are some of the critical skills that the real-world education of network marketing teaches:
- An attitude of success
- Dressing for success
- Overcoming personal fears, doubts, and lack of confidence.
- Overcoming the fear of rejection.
- Communications skills
- People Skills
- Time management skills.
• Accountability skills
- Practical goal setting
• Money management skills
- Investing skills
Good network marketing companies provide a solid program of training in all these areas. Network marketing is a real-world business school for people who want to learn the real-world skills of an entrepreneur, rather than the skills of an employee.
Asset #2: A Profitable Path of Personal Development
Each of us has a winner and a loser inside of us. The winner is up for the risk, but the loser thinks only of safety and security. Every time we let our fears, our doubts, or our low self-esteem win, the loser emerges and holds sway. Learning to share your vision and tell a powerful, persuasive story is learning how to override the loser inside you and allowing the winner to rise to the surface. Learning how to tell a powerful story is learning how to show up as the winner you are. Network marketing gives you the opportunity to face your fears, deal with them, overcome them, and bring out the winner that you have living inside you.
Asset #3: A Circle of Friends Who Share Your Dreams and Values
Many people spend their lives hanging out and networking with people who hold them back financially. In a network marketing business, you hang out with people who are there to help you become richer. Network marketing not only provides great business education, but it also provides a whole new world of friends — friends who are going in the same direction as you are and share the same core values as you do. You can’t get rich in isolation; you are only as good as the community of people you hang out with, talk with, work with, and play with. This is also one of the great advantages of a network marketing business: Rather than being surrounded by people who are competing with you for that next promotion, here your business is filled with people who are just as committed to your success as you are, because your success is what assures their success.
Asset #4: The Power of Your Own Network
In networking marketing the power is not in the product; the power is in the network. If you want to become rich, the best strategy is to find a way to build a strong, viable, growing network. That’s why network marketing is so brilliant. The companies that make up the network marketing industry now offer millions of people just like yourself the opportunity to build their own network rather than spend their lives working for someone else’s network. Metcalfe’s Law : V = N^2 (a network’s economic value equals the number of the network’s users squared).In plain language, Metcalfe’s Law means that a network acts as a lever: It allows you to leverage your time and effort. Network marketing is one of the fastest-growing business models in the world today, the real business is not the product, but the networks through which the product travels.
Asset #5: A Duplicable, Fully Scalable Business
Network marketing is about sharing information and personal stories, and not about hard selling. It is also about caring about the success of those you bring into the business. The key to success in network marketing is what you can duplicate. The ability to duplicate is the magic key here, not the ability to be a top salesperson. When network marketing companies fail to make this clear, they impair their ability to continuously develop and energize their growth engine: the people who duplicate themselves. Today, when you start your own network marketing business, you don’t have to become an adept public speaker. Instead of attempting to train yourself to become an expert speaker and presenter, you simply use the business tools provided by your company to do the presentations for you. Low-cost, high-quality CDs, DVDs, and online presentations — often including high-quality streaming audio and video — have made possible the dream of a truly democratic and fully scalable network marketing operation, creating a business model that has allowed millions to gain access and excel.t means that as you build your networking business, you are building a fully scalable asset. In plain English, it means you can grow a business as big as you want. As a network marketer, your job description, so to speak, is to connect with people, invite them to experience the products you are excited about and take a look at the information you have, and then follow up with them. Then, once they’ve decided to join you in the business, you share with them your enthusiasm, your experiences, and you help them learn to do what you have learned to do. Here, again, there are digital tools that can take a huge amount of the burden and expertise of training off your shoulders. Your job is to build relationships, have conversations, explore possibilities, get to know people, and help them get to understand what this business is all about. You don’t need highly skilled salespeople to duplicate what you do. You need people who are willing to learn basic business and communication skills and grow themselves personally into self-determining entrepreneurs and team-builders.
Asset #6: Incomparable Leadership Skills
The reason it takes leadership is that while many people repeat the same overused words and phrases about dreams, more time with family, and freedom, few people inspire enough trust and inspiration to cause others to follow those words and phrases. It’s not a matter of memorizing and repeating the right words; it’s developing the ability to speak directly to other people’s spirits. This is a quality that goes beyond words. This is genuine leadership. Leadership is the force that makes it all come together. Leadership is what builds great businesses. That’s leadership: the power to make things happen through the sheer force of the vision you share. Genuine leaders can move mountains. All great leaders have been master storytellers who were able to communicate the vision in such a vivid way that others saw it, too. Money does not go to the business with the best products or services. Money flows to the business with the best leaders. A business that has forgotten how to tell its own story is soon out of business, even if it has tons of inventory. Communication affects every aspect of life — and this is the №1 skill that network marketing teaches. Network marketing leaders sometimes describe themselves as “highly paid storytellers.” In fact, they are among the most highly paid storytellers, and there’s a very simple reason for this: They are among the best storytellers. Network marketing tends to develop the type of leader who influences others by being a great teacher, teaching others to fulfill their life’s dreams by teaching others to go for their dreams. Elements of leadership required to be successful in business.: Mind; Spirit; Body; Emotions. If you cannot control these four aspects of yourself, then you will fail.
Asset #7: A Mechanism for Genuine Wealth Creation
Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is not measured by the size of income. Wealth is measured in time. Wealth is measured by the richness of your life experience today plus the number of days into the future that you have the capacity to continue living at that level of experience. One reason the rich get richer is that the rich work for a different kind of money. They don’t work to generate the income — they work to build wealth. One of the most profound values of a network marketing business — and it is one that the great majority of people who look at this business do not quite grasp — is that it is an engine of personal wealth creation. Simple Four-Step Path to Financial Freedom:
1)Build a business
2) Reinvest in your business
3) Invest in real estate
4) Let your assets buy luxuries
A business is like a child: It takes time to grow. While it can take less time, and can certainly take more, getting a business off the ground typically takes about five years. Your goal is not to replace your job with your business — that’s just treating your business like your new job. Reinvest your new income in that business in order to grow it still further. A true business owner never stops investing and reinvesting to build the business. The reason so many people fail to achieve great wealth in any business is simply that they fail to reinvest continually in the business. There are certainly places where you can invest some money wisely: on training and educating yourself, on travel to support your growing network in other cities, on promotional and educational tools and resources to help nourish the business. For the most part, though, network marketing is a business whose major capital investment is not your money but your time and effort. You’ll notice there are no mutual funds, stock portfolios, or other paper assets in this plan. That’s because even though they are the easiest assets to build (all you have to do is buy them), trading in stocks and mutual funds is risky, profits made are taxed at the capital gain rate, and investing takes financial education to lessen risk. The idea here is to use your new supplemental money to build an income-generating asset. The purpose of buying real estate is not to sell it; the purpose of buying real estate is to build an income-generating asset. You don’t use your income to buy yourself luxuries: You use your income to build your assets — your business and real estate investments — and then, once they’re sufficiently built to be able to do so, you let them buy your luxuries
Asset #8: Big Dreams and the Capacity to Live Them
One of the most valuable things about network marketing companies is that they stress the importance of going for your dreams. They don’t just want you to have dreams; they want you to live those dreams. The small shift in thinking, multiplied by the experiences, perceptions, and decisions of a lifetime, will take you to a place that is millions of miles away from where you would have landed without that shift. Big people have big dreams and small people have small dreams. If you want to change who you are, begin by changing the size of your dream. When you start building your network marketing business, you start living your dreams, albeit in small ways at first, from Day One. It is a shift in mindset, from “I can’t” to “I can”; from being at the mercy of circumstance to being at the helm of your life; from being enslaved to being free.
The network marketing business is A Business Where Women Excel. The supporting, coaching, nurturing relationship of a network marketing sponsor to her growing network of apprentice networkers is the kind of relationship and interaction in which women excel.
Part Three: Your Future Starts Now
Newcomers to network marketing often make this choice by default, by simply signing up with the first opportunity to come along. Now, it may well be that the first company you hear about is a great company and a wise choice for you. But it should be an informed, educated choice that you make with care. This is your future we’re talking about. When choosing a company to work with, the product is not the most important consideration. The №1 reason I recommend network marketing is for its system of real-world business education and personal development. When you find a company like that, with leaders above you who are willing to train you and help you become the business person you can be, that’s a company to stay with.
Problems always happen. If you have the right people running the ship, then whatever goes wrong, they’ll fix it. In fact, if you have great people running the company, there’s no problem they can’t fix. Look at the principals. What are their backgrounds, their experience, their track records, their character? What you want is a company that knows what it’s doing and gives you clear signs that it’s going to be there for the long haul. One of the beauties of the network marketing system is that it is set up to be the exact opposite of the dog-eat-dog corporate environment, where even your best friend may climb over you to get to the next rung on the ladder. In network marketing, that kind of cutthroat competition doesn’t happen, simply because your sponsor’s and upline’s success depends on your success. The people who profit from your growth want you to grow!
It is not a tangible asset that is valuable. It is information relative to the asset that ultimately made a person rich or poor. It is not real estate, gold, stocks, hard work, or money that makes you rich; it is what you know about real estate, gold, stocks, hard work, and money that makes you rich. Ultimately, it is your financial intelligence that makes you rich. If you budget your money wisely and learn about the B and I quadrants, then you are on the path to great personal fortune and, most importantly, freedom.
The future of genuine wealth lies in pioneering ways of doing business that elevate the financial well-being of humanity. Network marketing is a revolutionary form of business: For the first time in history, it is now possible for anyone and everyone to share in the wealth that, until now, has been reserved only for the chosen few or the lucky.
It is time that people all over the world had an equal opportunity to enjoy a rich and abundant life, rather than spend their lives working hard only to make the rich richer. It’s time you had that opportunity.
Welcome to the 21st-century business!
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About the authors:
Robert Kiyosaki is the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad — the №1 personal finance book of all time — a book that challenged and changed the way tens of millions of people think about money. Rich Dad Poor Dad ranks as the longest-running bestseller on all four of the lists that report to Publisher’s Weekly — The New York Times, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today — and was named “USA Today’s №1 Money Book” two years in a row. It is the third-longest-running “how-to” best-seller of all time. With perspectives on money and investing that often contradict conventional wisdom, Robert has earned a reputation for straight talk, irreverence, and courage. His point of view that the “old” advice — get a good job, save money, get out of debt, invest for the long term in a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds — is “bad” (both obsolete and flawed) advice, challenges the status quo. His assertion that “your house is not an asset” stirred controversy, but has been proven to be accurate for many homeowners.
K IM KIYOSAKI
With a passion for educating women about money and
investing, Kim Kiyosaki draws on a lifetime of experience in
business, real estate, and investing in her mission to support financial education. Kim has been a featured guest on The Larry King Show, FOX News, and A BraveHeart View Internet The television show and she is the host of the PBS Rich Woman show. Kim was recently featured as a financial education advocate in Essence magazine, and she is a columnist for WomanEntrepreneur.com.Kim is a self-made millionaire and a happily married (but fiercely independent)woman. Her first book, Rich Woman: A Book on Investing for Women, hit the BusinessWeek best-seller list the month it was released. Rich Woman is a best-seller in numerous countries throughout the world, including Mexico, South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, and across Europe.
