Several months after writing the “I Cannot Teach You” article I received a letter from a relative of JD. JD’s father had read the article and explained to me that “Many are simply not capable of doing certain things and we need to recognize that.” and that “You can’t make somebody into something they don’t want to be or haven’t got the capacity to accomplish.”.

First let me explain my struggles about these two quotes with you. JD’s father is somebody I have known my entire life, has been a mentor to me, and someone I have held very dear in my heart since the day I was born. I have always taken advice from him, and he has guided me to much of my successes and picked me up through many of my failures. So with all of that in mind I immediatly converted my thinking to his and agreed with these statements. After thinking about them and rolling them around in my head for a while, I mentally came to, slapped myself across the face and said “NO!”.

When we are talking about mental changes and the capacity to change your mind, there are no limits! EVERYONE posseses the ability to change! Somewhere along the way JD’s father had lost the very basic principal given to us as kids and that is that you can be anything you want to be, you can accomplish anything as long as you put your mind to it. If someone has been led to beleive that they do not have the capacity or ability to do something their entire life, it may be a bit hard to change this person’s mindset, but in actuality the capacity and ability is still there with some very large walls trapping it inside like a prison.

I am working on my methods, but I would like for any of you reading this to post a comment on here answering the following question.

How do you break down these prison walls in order to let ideas and the potential to do ANYTHING back out into the world?

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I have found there are two very different types of employees.

Employee X:

The X employee is most typically an hourly employee, but can also be a salary employee, but is always required to put in their 8 hours a day, no matter the work load. This type of employee shows up at 8am, takes a 15 minute break at 10am, takes an hour lunch at 12pm, another 15 minute break at 3pm, and is out the door at 5pm. It does not matter what the work load is or the importance of the work being time-sensitive or not. This is the schedule they have been given by there employer for them to follow so they follow it. Very rarely will you ever see this employee in the office early or still in the office after 5pm. The X employee does exactly what they are told to do being sure not to do more or less than what their job description says they do.

Employee Y:

The Y employee is typically a salary employee and comes and goes as he/she pleases, but is always there when it is necessary. This employee may work 2 hours in a day or may work 12 depending on what needs to be done. This is a very task oriented employee that tracks their progress by what is getting done versus the time they have put in. This employee will come up with new ways to get things done more efficiently in order to allow them to have more free time or more time to get other things done. This employee does everything in their job description and many things in other peoples job descriptions.

Now that these are both laid out, which type of employee are you? Which type of employee are you, not which one you would like to be. Some people have been brought up and trained as an X employee for so long that they wouldn’t have any idea how to be a Y employee and if they were given the freedom of a Y employee it could actually cause them to under perform. Some people completely disagree with the X employee type of employment and if placed in that type of employment, they too will actually under perform because of all the restrictions holding them back.

I believe it is an employers job to determine what type of employees they have working for them and come up with work structure and compensation plan for each individual employee. All too often in companies the employer thinks that every employee should be treated the same and have the same rights, rules, and restrictions as the rest and even base compensation on what another employee makes.

In my opinion, the employer that is not utilizing and compensating its employees properly is missing out on the employees full potential and the full potential of the company as a whole. If I were an employer I would hire a full staff of X employees if I wanted everything to stay the same and just wanted to get the exact same results day in and day out. I would hire a staff of Y employees if I wanted to continually push the envelope, expand my business, and have new ideas day in and day out.

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It is next to impossible to teach someone who is unwilling to learn. I have someone in my life that is this way about money as well as many other “new” ideas. Who it is, is irrelevant and for this piece we will call the person JD for John/Jane Doe.

JD always seems to be stuck in this rut and can never seem get ahead. When you ask JD why, JD will always have an excuse for being in the rut and will come up with every excuse not to get out of the rut. Don’t get get me wrong, JD loves the idea of getting out of the rut, but is unwilling to do the work it takes to get out of the rut. I believe the mindset is that JD believes that the every day work, working multiple jobs, cleaning the house, taking care of the kids, etc. is enough and the money should just flow and the problems should just disappear.

The reality is that you have to think about this as being stuck in this massively deep hole in the ground. It is going to take a lot of work to first figure out how to get out and then following through and actually climbing your way to the top and out of the hole. If you continue to do what you have been doing you will never be able to climb out of that hole. You will sit there and wander around at the bottom of this hole waiting for someone to rescue you.

The reason I say that it is next to impossible to teach someone who is unwilling to learn is because like many people, JD is stuck in this hole waiting to be rescued. Even if I come along and drop a rope down for JD to climb up, it will not help. JD will start to climb, but quickly decide that the climb is still too hard and will expect to be pulled up rather than putting in the effort.

This is the same with money. Unless you are a one in a billion lottery winner or a trust fund baby, money is not just going to fall at your feet. You can be given the tools to become rich, but if you are unwilling to put them to use because it is too hard or too confusing, you will never become rich and you will stay in that rut the rest of your life.

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Although this week has been kind of quiet around the office with Robert and Kim being in South Africa, I have been quite busy with a couple of things. First, I started a CASHFLOW® the E-Game club/group. The purpose of the group is to get as many people as possible online together at least once a week to play CASHFLOW® the E-Game online against each other. For those of you who have never heard of or played the game, it is a very fun game that has changed many peoples lives. It changes your thinking at the very basic level, almost without you even knowing or thinking about why or how it is changing your thinking. I guess some would say it affects you at a sub-conscious level. Since playing it, I now recommend it to everyone I know, of all ages.

The other thing I started to do this week is get the ball rolling on my first real estate investment. I am starting very small, but I am starting! It was very strange timing, but the other day I went to look at the property over my lunch break and when I got back I had a message from a girl in my CASHFLOW® group. She was feeling stuck, she knew she wanted to do something in real estate, just wasn’t sure where to get started. The problem I saw was that she was scaring herself out of starting at all. She was afraid of waisting time on a bad deal, afraid of a mortgage company ripping her off, not sure where to look, etc. My advice to her was to stop thinking and just do something. At least get out there and start looking at places. Start feeling out mortgage companies and if you can, compare that against friend’s and family member’s mortgages. Just get out there and start doing something! If you sit and think about all of the things that could go wrong you will never accomplish any of the things that could go right.

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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.

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