When I woke up this morning, I said a prayer and went straight to my schedule. I applied for some jobs. I did not listen to the "Stranger" podcast, watch Democracy Now, or watch C-SPAN. I did not read the Economist or the New York Times.
It's a struggle to delay gratification and wait until the evening to do all the distracting things such as reading the headlines, watching political and social commentators and reading some of my favorite authors.
No, Tuesdays are now for volunteering and doing something worthwhile with my day. I work odd jobs to support myself, but in this first quarter of the year, I want to tweak my business plan, develop a very solid team for executing my ideas, and work on getting funding from either investors, SBA loans, or crowd funding.
According to Kiyosaki, dumb and lazy people use their own money to finance their business ventures. Although that may sound counter-intuitive Kiyosaki explains in "Unfair Advantage: The Power of Financial Education" that rich people use other people's money in the form of debt to get rich.
Indeed, the more I learn about how some are the most important companies of the past decade were financed, the more I realize that wealthy people use investors to back their ideas and provide a means to execute their ideas. Mark Zuckerberg and his team did not bet the farm to start Facebook. First, they formed a team and worked on executing the idea and then moved the idea to Silicon Valley after receiving backing from people like Peter Thiel. Most of the larger fortunes in this country do not stem from sheer bootstrapping.
The only reason that I became interested in these subjects is because I like to expose myself to ambiguity.
It would be nice to take up chess this year, all the brilliant people in the world seem to play chess.
Using the information that I gain from books is not enough, I have to apply the information to problems that occur daily, and also see how the information I use can be relevant to others. In a sense, it's not enough to read and use the information, the material has to be useful in a broader context. That's why I am so adamant about escaping the grind of a 9 to 5 and building companies that can employ people.
Of course, the reason that Facebook and others since have been successful is not from investment alone, but it would not have been the phenomenon that it is today without other people's money.
There are so many things that I'm learning from Kiyosaki that I never learned while in school. It inspires me to stick to my plan of getting out of the rat race and into the smarter game of entrepreneurship.