FRIDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2017
In the late nineties Robert Kiyosaki wrote a book about financial literacy and financial independence. As is often the case, I had been years behind most other people, and only recently read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Some thoughts about it.
I get the idea that you shouldn’t necessarily focus on trying to get “rich” – the lesson one expects from a book that teaches you about money. What you should do is to develop assets, like rental property, a stock portfolio, investment funds, and digital assets like websites.
Say your living expenses, including housing and food, and insurance policies and retirement policies and medical insurance, and travel and short trips, and so on run to $2000 per month. If income from your portfolio of assets is stable and constant without the need to perform any (or much) additional work, and it exceeds your $2000 budget, work you perform for monetary gain is optional.
This means you’ll be financially independent – even if you’re not “rich” in a way that the concept is usually understood.
SUNDAY, 10 DECEMBER 2017
I understand now that it’s not just about becoming “rich” but about improving your financial intelligence. What does it help after all if your income grows to five or ten times more than before, but your expenses also multiply by five or ten times?
TUESDAY, 26 DECEMBER 2017
14:31
I’m currently reading Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker.
Eker refers to the financial blueprint one receives from your parents as a child. If I look back over the years, it seems that I, too, accepted the blueprint I received from my parents – to a large extent from my father. I assumed that I was probably going to struggle financially, no matter how hard I worked.
So what do I do now as an adult decades later? I work hard, but on projects that are not intended to make money. I’m doing it because it makes me happy, and because I feel I can leave something of my life behind in this way.
Fair enough, one will say, but it is still the result of me who decided the blueprint I had received from my parents was simply how the world works and how it should be. Fact is, it is not.
[It can be said that much of what I have written since 1994 was me wrestling with my blueprint and the world in which I had to function. Eventually I made an uncomfortable peace with the world and continued my life as I found fit. What cannot be denied is that many of the positions I took and many of the statements I made were still the Blueprint speaking. And I so completely accepted and internalised the blueprint that I would say what I had said without blinking an eye – unaware that I was in a semi-hypnotised state.]
18:30
In the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the psychologist, Daniel Kahneman writes about experiments he and his team performed that proved how easily people can be manipulated – even if they are told there’s a possibility it will happen.
In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams mentions that it’s better to think of yourself as a programmable robot than a “fleshy bag full of magic”.
In Trading in the Zone, Mark Douglas explains how to overcome beliefs that are obstacles in the path to success, to tap the energy out of them, and to create new beliefs that you then activate and eventually fill with energy.
And in Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, T. Harv Eker writes how your relationship with money as an adult, and how successful you are at making money, directly result from the programming you received as a child – verbally (“Rich people are greedy,” or in my case, work hard, but if it’s “God’s will”, you’ll end up with nothing), by modelling (you saw how your parents worked hard but never had enough money), and by what he calls emotional incidents that left a big impression on you as a child (for me, 1985: mysterious powers of which I know or understand nothing take some of our stuff – including a box of my childhood toys in the garage. Apparently it’s not theft. The law is on their side. Implants the idea of THEM – lawyers, bailiffs, and other powerful characters who can crush the little people any time they want.).
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