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?

Please share this post!

Hide Sites

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.

Please share this post!

Hide Sites

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.

Please share this post!

Hide Sites