Lessons Learned

The five days of Rich Dad seminars I just attended were extremely mind stretching. Not only did I learn a ton from Robert Kiyosaki and all of the presentors, but I learned even more from the attendees. During the ten minute breaks given every so often, lunches, dinners, and even in the hotel bar at night is where I really got to expand my knowledge. The ability to sit and talk to so many people about what they learned was absolutly priceless. We were all in the same conference room and were all given the same exact information during the seminars, but every person translated that information quite differently. For every lesson taught in the seminar I was able to get ten more just by listening to what the other attendees had learned from those lessons.

To be able to get ten lessons out of a single lesson requires the ability expand your context. One of the main lessons of the entire five days was that of content and context. This is basically the difference between the information you are given (content) and your ability to obtain that information (context). You can be given all the information in the world, but it does you no good if you do not have the capacity to obtain and use that information. People who think they are always right are a perfect example. They are always right so anything new or other peoples ideas on the same subject must be wrong and they dis-regard it. Those people simply do not have the ability or are un-willing to expand their context in order to fit more content.

Another great lesson I took from these seminars is that I do not have to know all the answers or be the best at everything. Having that mindset is like wearing cement shoes while trying to run a marathon. Yes, you can still run the marathon, but you will be working a million times harder than everyone else. Being able to admit that you do not know everything and are not the best at everything allows you to see that there are way smarter people than you out there that can and are willing to perform the tasks you need to be performed much better than you ever could and much faster than you ever could.

Now that I know and have come to terms with that lesson I can start to focus on building a team of people who are far smarter and more efficient than I am. My goals have not changed a single bit, but how I reach them has changed forever. I no longer have to work my butt off trying to know and do everything, I simply find the people who already know what I want to know and who are experts at doing what I want done. To go back to my marathon analogy, having a great team built is like running that same marathon in a sports car.