If you want to be financially successful, there are three different types of education you require: scholastic, professional, and financial education.
Scholastic education teaches you how to read, write, and do math. It is a very important education, especially in today’s world. Personally, I did not do well with this level of education. As I’ve said, I was a C student most of my life, simply because I was not that interested in what I was being taught.
Professional education teaches you how to work for money. In other words, it prepares you for life in the E and S quadrants. During my youth, the smart kids went on to become doctors, lawyers, and accountants. Others went to professional schools that taught them to become medical assistants, plumbers, builders, electricians, and automobile mechanics.
I didn’t excel here, either. Since I had not done well at scholastic education, I was not encouraged to become a doctor, lawyer, or accountant. Instead, I became a ship’s officer and then a helicopter pilot, flying for the Marine Corps in Vietnam.
By the time I was 23 years old, I had two professions, one as a ship’s officer and the other as a pilot, but I never really used either of them to make money.
Financial education is where you learn to have money work for you rather than to have you work for money. You might think you’d get a financial education in business school, but by and large, that’s not what happens. What business schools generally do is take the smartest kids and train them to be business executives for the rich. In other words, they train their students for life in the upper echelon of the E quadrant—but it’s still the E quadrant.
After I returned from Vietnam, I considered going back to school to get my MBA, but my rich dad talked me out of it. He said, “If you get an MBA from a traditional school, you are being trained to be an employee of the rich. If you want to be rich yourself, you don’t need more scholastic education, you need a real-world financial education.”
The Important Skills
Being an entrepreneur and building a B quadrant business is not easy. In fact, I believe building a quadrant business is one of the toughest challenges a person can take on. The reason there are so many more people in the E and S quadrants is that those quadrants are less demanding than the B quadrant. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
If you are going to be successful in business, there are technical skills you need to learn that you probably did not learn in school. For example, the ability to get organized and set your own agenda.
This is bigger than it might sound. People who enter the arena of network marketing sometimes experience a type of culture shock, because they are used to being told what to do. You may work very, very hard in the E quadrant, yet have absolutely no experience at setting goals, organizing a plan of action, setting your agenda, managing your time, and executing a clear sequence of productive actions.
It’s shocking how many people do not have these basic skills. Shocking, but not surprising. After all, in the E quadrant, you really don’t need them. But if you’re entering the B quadrant, they are not an option. They are every bit as important as skills like knowing how to balance a checkbook, write a financial plan, and read an annual report.
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