Robert T. Kiyosaki

Robert Toru Kiyosaki (born April 8, 1947) is an investor, businessman, self-help author and motivational speaker. Kiyosaki is best known for his Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of motivational books and other material. He has written 18 books which combined have sold over 26 million copies.

Although beginning as a self-publisher, he was subsequently published by Warner Books, a division of Hachette Book Group USA, currently his new books appear under the Rich Dad Press imprint. Three of his books, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant, and Rich Dad's Guide to Investing, have been on the top 10 best-seller lists simultaneously on The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the New York Times. The book Rich Kid Smart Kid was published in 2001, with the intent to help parents teach their children financial concepts. He has created three 'Cashflow' board and software games for adults and children and has a series of 'Rich Dad' audio cassettes and disks. He also publishes a monthly newsletter.

Personal life

A fourth-generation Japanese American, Kiyosaki was born in India and raised in Hawaii . He is the son of the late educator Ralph H. Kiyosaki (1919-1991). After graduating from Hilo High School, he attended the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in New York, graduating with the class of 1969 as a deck officer. He later served in the Marine Corps as a helicopter gunship pilot during the Vietnam War, where he was awarded the Air Medal.

Kiyosaki left the Marine Corps in 1974 and got a job selling copy machines for the Xerox Corporation. In 1977, Kiyosaki started a company that brought to market the first nylon and Velcro 'surfer' wallets. The company garnered moderate success at first but would eventually go bankrupt. In the early 1980s, Kiyosaki started a business that licensed T-shirts for Heavy metal rock bands. Around 1996–1997 he launched Cashflow Technologies, Inc. which operates and owns the Rich Dad (and Cashflow) brand.

He is married to Kim Kiyosaki.

Teachings

A large part of Kiyosaki's teachings focus on generating passive income by means of investment opportunities, such as real estate and businesses, with the ultimate goal of being able to support oneself by such investments alone. In tandem with this, Kiyosaki defines 'assets' as things that generate cash inflow, such as rental properties or businesses—and 'liabilities' as things that generate cash outflow, such as house payments, cars, and so on. Such definitions are somewhat based on the concept of negative gearing. Kiyosaki also argues that financial leverage is critically important in becoming rich.

Kiyosaki stresses what he calls 'financial literacy' as the means to obtaining wealth. He says that life skills are often best learned through experience and that there are important lessons not taught in school. He says that formal education is primarily for those seeking to be employees or self-employed individuals, and that this is an 'Industrial Age idea.' And according to Kiyosaki, in order to obtain financial freedom, one must be either a business owner or an investor, generating passive income.

Kiyosaki speaks often of what he calls 'The Cashflow Quadrant,' a conceptual tool that aims to describe how all the money in the world is earned. Depicted in a diagram, this concept entails four groupings, split with two lines (one vertical and one horizontal). In each of the four groups there is a letter representing a way in which an individual may earn income. The letters are as follows.

E: Employee — Working for someone else.

S: Self-employed or Small business owner — Where a person owns his own job and is his own boss.

B: (Big) Business owner — Where a person owns a 'system' of making money, rather than a job to make money.

I: Investor — Spending money in order to receive a larger payout in.

Books

Kiyosaki is best known for his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, the #1 New York Times bestseller. Kiyosaki followed with Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant and Rich Dad's Guide to Investing. He has now had at least a dozen books published. A partial list of his books is included below.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money—That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! (1997)

Originally self-published before being picked up commercially to become a best seller, the central concept of the book is an anecdotal comparison of his 'two fathers.' His 'poor dad' was his biological father, who became Superintendent of the Hawaii State Department of Education but had very little real net worth. Contrasted with this is his (arguably fictitious, see 'Criticism and controversy' section of this article) 'rich dad,' advocates tax-advantaged investment vehicles, such as real estate or businesses, rather than ownership of securities. This idea is further developed in his later books and 'Rich Dad' became Kiyosaki's personal brand for various publishing ventures.

Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom (2000)

Cashflow Quadrant is a personal finance and investing book written with Sharon Lechter, C.P.A. as the sequel to Rich Dad, Poor Dad. In it, Kiyosaki discusses what he calls the cashflow quadrant: a grid consisting of the letters 'E', 'S', 'B', and 'I'. The cashflow quadrant itself is just an illustrative tool to show the difference between Employees, Self Employed/Small Business owners, Business owners (not directly involved in the day-to-day operation of the company), and Investors. Kiyosaki discusses the differences between concepts and ideas characteristic of each quadrant, particularly as they relate to passive income and tax advantages. Again, as a self-help author, he invites readers to consider their own ideas about money.

Rich Dad's Guide to Investing: What the Rich Invest in, That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not! (2000)

Rich Dad's Guide to Investing gives the reader a roadmap to becoming the Ultimate Investor, one who uses other peoples' money to create investments that people want to buy into. While the first two books use broad strokes, this one goes into much more detail about actually implementing some of the strategies heretofore discussed.

Rich Kid, Smart Kid (2001)

Rich Kid, Smart Kid is a retelling of Kiyosaki's views, condensed and clarified to try and help parents better understand and teach their children key financial concepts. It includes a series of activities that a parent can do with their child to make them aware of property, finance and the various ways and places businesses make money.

Rich Dad's Prophecy (2002)

Rich Dad's Prophecy predicts that the market will crash around 2016 when the oldest Baby Boomers start cashing out their 401(k) plans. Individuals whose savings are locked into 401(k) plans will suffer because these retirement plans are not flexible and do not do well in a bear market. Robert Kiyosaki believes this may be his most important book yet.

Why We Want You To Be Rich coauthored by Donald Trump (2007)

Why We Want You To Be Rich is a book written by both Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump. It encourages individuals to become financially literate to combat the upcoming problems facing America, such as the shrinking middle class and the entitlement mentality.

Other Books:

* If you want to be Rich & Happy don't go to School? (1992)

    * The Business School for People Who Like Helping People (2001) - endorses multi-level marketing.

    * Retire Young, Retire Rich (2001)

    * Rich Dad's The Business School (2003)

    * Who Took My Money (2004)

    * Rich Dad, Poor Dad for Teens (2004)

    * Before You Quit Your Job (2005)

    * Rich Dad's Escape from the Rat Race - Comic for children (2005)

    * Rich Dad's Increase Your Financial IQ: Get Smarter with Your Money (2008)

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Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883–November 8, 1970) was an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal success literature. His most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, is one of the best-selling books of all time. Hill's works examined the power of personal beliefs, and the role they play in personal success. 'What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve' is one of Hill's hallmark expressions. How achievement actually occurs, and a formula for it that puts success in reach for the average person, were the focus of Hill's books.

Life and works

According to his official biographer, Hill was born in poverty in a one-room cabin in the town of Pound in rural Wise County, Virginia. His mother died when he was ten years old. His father remarried two years later. At the age of 13, he began writing as a 'mountain reporter' for small-town newspapers. He used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon had to withdraw for financial reasons. The turning point in his career is considered to have been in 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous men, to interview industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was one of the most powerful men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that the process of success could be elaborated in a simple formula that could be duplicated by the average person. Impressed with Hill, Carnegie commissioned him (without pay and only offering to provide him with letters of reference) to interview over 500 successful men and women, many of them millionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.

As part of his research, Hill interviewed many of the most famous people of the time, including Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Elmer Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Allen Ward and Jennings Randolph. The project lasted over twenty years, during which Hill became an advisor to Carnegie. As a result of these studies, the Philosophy of Achievement was offered as a formula for rags-to-riches success by Hill and Carnegie, published initially in 1928 as a study course called, The Law of Success. The Achievement formula was detailed further and published in home-study courses, including the seventeen-volume 'Mental Dynamite' series until 1941.

From 1919 to 1920, Hill was the editor and publisher of Hill's Golden Rule magazine. In 1930 he published The Ladder to Success. From 1933 to 1936 Hill was an unpaid advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. In 1937 Hill distilled the Philosophy of Achievement and produced his most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, which is still in print in several versions, and has sold more than 30 million copies. In 1960, Hill published an abridged version of the book, which for years was the only one generally available. In 2004, Ross Cornwell published Think and Grow Rich!: The Original Version, Restored and Revised (Second Printing 2007), which restored the book to its original content, with slight revisions, and added the first comprehensive endnotes, index, and appendix the book had ever contained. (The Cornwell-Hill 'collaboration' resulted from the former's service as editor-in-chief of 'Think & Grow Rich Newsletter,' published for the Napoleon Hill Foundation.) There are dozens of other books listed as 'written' by Napoleon Hill but are usually some rehashing of Napoleon Hill's original works with some 'point of view' or 'new and improved' or 'update to the 21st century' additions.

In 1939 Hill published How to Sell Your Way through Life, and in 1953 How to Raise Your Own Salary. From 1952 to 1962 he worked with W. Clement Stone of the Combined Insurance Company of America to teach Stone's 'Philosophy of Personal Achievement', and to lecture on the 'Science of Success'. Partly as a result of his work with Stone, in 1960 he published Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. He died in 1970 at age 87 in South Carolina, and in 1971 his final work, You Can Work Your Own Miracles, was published posthumously.

Hill called his success teachings 'The Philosophy of Achievement' and he considered freedom, democracy, capitalism, and harmony to be important contributing elements. For without these, Hill demonstrated throughout his writings, personal beliefs are not possible. He contrasted his philosophy with others, and thought Achievement was superior and responsible for the success Americans enjoyed for the better part of two centuries. Fear and selfishness had no part to play in his philosophy, and Hill considered them to be the source of failure for unsuccessful people.

The secret of Achievement was tantalizingly offered to readers of Think and Grow Rich, and was never named directly as Hill felt discovering it for themselves would provide readers with the most benefit. Hill presented the idea of a 'Definite Major Purpose' as a challenge to his readers, to make them ask of themselves 'in what do you truly believe?' For according to Hill, 98% of people had no firm beliefs, putting true success firmly out of reach. Hill's numerous books have sold millions of copies, proving that the secret of Achievement is still highly sought-after by modern Americans. Hill dealt with many controversial subjects through his writings including racism, slavery, oppression, failure, revolution, war and poverty. Persevering and then succeeding in spite of these obstacles using the philosophy of Achievement, Hill stated, was the responsibility of every American.

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