and

from the whole university, only Jeff, Jon, and another person were selected
to go to the company’s headquarters in San Francisco for a final interview.
Gossip had it that once you made it that far into the interview process you were
in.
Jeff and Jon came back from the trip so nervous and excited that they could
barely contain themselves. Finally, the phone call came: Jon was offered a
position in the financial/banking division. Jeff wasn’t.
I had never seen Jeff so emotionally down. Feeling lost, he kept asking me
what he was going do with the rest of his life.
He had done everything society told him to do and he felt like a failure.
Listening to the well-intentioned advice of others, he decided to go to grad
school to study business information systems. That way, he thought, his chances
of landing a really good job would improve. He took his GMAT, and was
accepted into an excellent school. He would begin classes in the fall of 2001.
But I could not help but wonder if advanced schooling would help us.
According to Robert Kiyosaki, more education would probably throw us deeper
into debt. We would be digging a hole of liabilities instead of building up assets.
Plus, after grad school, Jeff would probably get a corporate job and I hated my
corporate job enough for the both of us.
One day I asked Jeff to sit down and listen as I read to him from Rich Dad’s
Guide to Investing:
“‘Your first decision is to figure out in which quadrant you have the most
chance of achieving long-term financial success.’…
Pointing to the E quadrant, I said, ‘You don’t have the expertise that
employers will pay the big money for, so you’ll probably never make enough
money as an employee to invest with. Besides, you’re sloppy, you get bored
easily, you don’t have a very long attention span, you tend to argue, and you
don’t follow instructions well. Therefore, your chances for financial success in
the E quadrant don’t look very good.’”
We looked at each other and knew we didn’t want to be employees for the
rest of our lives. Neither one of us possessed the traits of good workers. Jeff
realized that grad school was not for him. Even though I was glad to have gotten
a college education, I knew that using it to climb the organizational ladder
wasn’t for me. Concentrating on who we were and what we yearned for was our
goal.
Jeff and I became big Kiyosaki fans. We began to be so touched by rich dad’s
down-to-earth approach to business and to life that we quoted him. “Rich dad
says…” became part of our daily vocabulary.