Super. I won’t hold back then. There are maybe six people in the world who have not read Kiyosaki’s best-selling Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I am one of them.
Who wants to be a millionaire? Not me. If you want to be rich, go ahead, just don’t drag me along. If someone gave me a million dollars I would give it away. (Don’t believe it? Try me.)
Tell Kiyosaki fans that and they would probably look at you as if you’ve admitted to not brushing your teeth since you were eight.
The reason I gave this book a go was because Kiyosaki has a sister who is a Buddhist nun. That sparked my interest. Maybe, just maybe I would find something to like about this writer after all, I thought. Or not.
Kiyosaki semi-quotes the Chinese proverb, “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”.
He rephrases it to make less sense and gets confused about the proverb’s origin – that seems to happen a lot in his book. It does not seem to bother him.
Back to the fish. In most situations, it’s a great proverb.
In Kiyosaki’s case, he uses it to explain why he does not want to use his considerable wealth to help someone – not a stranger or even a distant relative looking to be bailed out of his gambling debts, but his sister, a Buddhist nun who has given her life to charitable causes. Emi has cancer and cannot afford the treatment. Her rich big brother tells her to raise her own money.
Not in those words, of course. He “teaches” her to fish by getting her to co-write this book and use the royalties to help herself.
Lucky for her, his name is on the cover too, so the book will, undoubtedly, sell like hot cakes.
If your name appeared on a book cover along with, say, Dan Brown’s, you could afford a lot of fish, too.
When Kiyosaki is not making my stomach churn, he is being plain annoying. He says everything twice. And then he says it again. And then he repeats it. So reading his book is like being with someone who speaks veerrrryy sloowwly. He over-explains things and illustrates with bizarre examples. Then he says it all again.
Take the expression “drink the Kool-Aid”. One explanation for the origins of this phrase is that it refers to the 1978 tragedy in Jonestown, Guyana, when blind obedience led to hundreds of people committing suicide by consuming poison mixed with a soft drink just because their cult leader told them to (actually, it wasn’t Kool-Aid but it is this drink that has come to be associated with the event).
Although Robert refers to the tragedy, he eventually and rather strangely forgets what he was saying.
He starts talking about how there are many flavours of Kool-Aid, and if you do not like any of them, you have to mix your own. What this means exactly, or symbolically, for that matter, I have no idea.
Most of what Kiyosaki says has been said by others before him – only they said it better.
When he does have an original thought, though, things just get odd. After hundreds of pages of griping about things that do not make sense about religion, he finds evidence of God.
Before this point, he had written “god” with a lowercase “g”. After deciding there’s an Almighty Being who gives cash rewards, he starts using the uppercase. Just one instance of how boorish he is!
Half the book is his sister Emi’s, so I hoped it would improve. Unfortunately, the best I can say about her section is that she is not as annoying as her brother.
I have no complaints about her “teachings” except that, like her brother, she has nothing new to say (except that being a nun is no excuse for not shopping around for proper insurance). If you want to read about Buddhism, there are hundreds of better books.
Robert Kiyosaki is famous and worshipped so this book will make it onto every best-seller list. All I can say is: Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
Review by AMY DE KANTER
The Star
No comments:
Post a Comment