Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant. Robert T. Kiyosaki

my next educational process.

      Traditional schools had been good to me. I had achieved my childhood professions. Reaching adulthood was confusing because there were no signs saying, “This is the way.” I knew what I didn’t want to do, but I did not know what I wanted to do.

      It would have been simple if all I wanted was a new profession. If I had wanted to be a medical doctor, I would have gone to medical school. If I had wanted to be a lawyer, I would have gone to law school. But I knew there was more to life than just going to school to gain another professional credential.

      I did not realize it at the time, but at 26 years of age, I was now looking for my path in life, not my next profession.

       A Different Education

      In 1973, in my last year of active duty flying for the Marine Corps when I was stationed near home in Hawaii, I knew I wanted to follow in my rich dad’s footsteps. While in the Marines, I signed up for real estate courses and business courses on the weekends, preparing to become an entrepreneur in the B and I quadrants.

      At the same time, upon a friend’s recommendation of a friend, I signed up for a personal-development course, hoping to find out who I really was. A personal-development course is non-traditional education because I was not taking it for credits or grades. I did not know what I was going to learn, as I did when I signed up for real estate courses. All I knew was that it was time to take courses to find out about me.

      In my first weekend course, the instructor drew this simple diagram on the flip chart:

      With the diagram complete, the instructor turned and said, “To develop into a whole human being, we need mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual education.”

      Listening to her explanation, it was clear to me that traditional schools were primarily about developing students mentally. That is why so many students who do well in school, do not do well in real life, especially in the world of money.

      As the course progressed over the weekend, I discovered why I disliked school. I realized that I loved learning, but hated school.

      Traditional education was a great environment for the “A” students, but it was not the environment for me. Traditional education was crushing my spirit, trying to motivate me with the emotion of fear: the fear of making mistakes, the fear of failing, and the fear of not getting a job. They were programming me to be an employee in the E or S quadrant. I realized that traditional education is not the place for a person who wants to be an entrepreneur in the B and I quadrants.

      This may be why so many entrepreneurs never finish school—entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison, founder of General Electric; Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company; Steve Jobs, founder of Apple; Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft; Walt Disney, founder of Disneyland; and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.

      As the day went on and the instructor went deeper and deeper into these four types of personal development, I realized I had spent most of my life in very harsh educational environments. After four years at an all-male military academy and five years as a Marine pilot, I was pretty strong mentally and physically. As a Marine pilot, I was strong emotionally and spiritually, but all on the macho-male development side. I had no gentle side, no female energy. After all, I was trained to be Marine Corps officer, emotionally calm under pressure, prepared to kill, and spiritually prepared to die for my country.

      If you ever saw the movie Top Gun starring Tom Cruise, you get a glimpse into the masculine world and bravado of military pilots. I loved that world. I was good in that world. It was a modern-day world of knights and warriors. It was not a world for wimps.

      In the seminar, I went into my emotions and briefly touched my spirit. I cried a lot because I had a lot to cry about. I had done and seen things no one should ever be asked to do. During the seminar, I hugged a man, something I had never done before, not even with my father.

      On Sunday night, it was difficult leaving this self-development workshop. The seminar had been a gentle, loving, honest environment. Monday morning was a shock to once again be surrounded by young egotistical pilots, dedicated to flying, killing and dying for country.

      After that weekend seminar, I knew it was time to change. I knew developing myself emotionally and spiritually to become a kinder, gentler, and more compassionate person would be the hardest thing I could do. It went against all my years at the military academy and flight school.

      I never returned to traditional education again. I had no desire to study for grades, degrees, promotions, or credentials again. From then on, if I did attend a course or school, I went to learn, to become a better person. I was no longer in the paper chase of grades, degrees, and credentials.

      Growing up in a family of teachers, your grades, the high school and college you graduated from, and your advanced degrees were everything. Like the medals and ribbons on a Marine pilot’s chest, advanced degrees and brand-name schools were the status and the stripes that educators wore on their sleeves. In their minds, people who did not finish high school were the unwashed, the lost souls of life. Those with master’s degrees looked down on those with only bachelor degrees. Those with a PhD were held in reverence. At the age of 26, I knew I would never return to that world.

       Editor’s Note: In 2009, Robert received an honorary PhD in entrepreneurship from prestigious San Ignacio de Loyola in Lima, Peru. The few other recipients of this award are political leaders, such as the former President of Spain.

       Finding My Path

      I know some of you are now asking: Why is he spending so much time talking about non-traditional education courses?

      The reason is, that first personal-development seminar rekindled my love of learning, but not the type of learning that is taught in school. Once that seminar was over, I became a seminar junkie, going from seminar to seminar, finding out more about the connection between my body, my mind, my emotions, and my spirit.

      The more I studied, the more curious about traditional education I became. I began to ask questions such as:

       • Why do so many kids hate school?

       • Why do so few kids like school?

       • Why are many highly educated people not successful in the real world?

       • Does school prepare you for the real world?

       • Why did I hate school but love learning?

       • Why are most schoolteachers poor?

       • Why do schools teach us little about money?

      Those questions led me to become a student of education outside the hallowed walls of the school system. The more I studied, the more I understood why I did not like school and why schools failed to serve most of its students, even the “A” students.

      My curiosity touched my spirit, and I became an entrepreneur in education. If not for this curiosity, I might never have become an author and a developer of financial-education games. My spiritual education led me to my path in life.

      It seems that our paths in life are not found in our minds. Our path in life is to find out what is in our hearts.

      This does not mean a person cannot find their path in traditional education. I am sure many do. I am just saying that I doubt I would have found my path in traditional school.

       Why Is a Path Important?

      We all know people who make a lot of money, but hate their work. We also know people who do not make a lot of money and hate their work. And we all know people who just work for money.

      A classmate of mine from the Merchant Marine Academy