Before You Quit Your Job

After reading Robert Kiyosaki's book Rich Dad Poor Dad and loving it, I eagerly wanted to get into his book Before You Quit Your Job, even though it's too late for me since I already work for myself. Overall it's a pretty good book, but not as captivating at the original, probably because this time he's not telling stories as much as detailing the thought process people should be ready for before deciding to start working for themselves. In that vein, I wish I'd been able to read it before I went out on my own.

What's really different about this book is that the most important lessons to be learned are actually in the introduction and chapter one. If, after reading those two chapters, your mindset isn't geared correctly based on the criteria, then it's probably best not to even start the process of working for yourself. For instance, his list of ten excuses people usually utter as to why they feel they can't go into business for themselves is illuminating right from the beginning, and later he mentions that one shouldn't wait for all the lights to turn green before pulling the trigger. He uses Microsoft as the perfect example of that philosophy; we all have experience with them.

Kiyosaki loves the number ten, obviously, because he then lists ten reasons people need to consider before they actually transition from employee to entrepreneur. Those things are:

1. Ability to change philosophy from security to freedom
2. Ability to operate without money
3. Ability to operate without security
4. Ability to focus on opportunity rather than resources
5. Having different management styles to manage different people
6. Ability to manage people and resources they do not control
7. Team and value oriented rather than pay or promotion oriented
8. Active learner - no graduation day
9. Generalized education rather than specialized
10. The courage to be responsible for the entire business

And, the book is subtitled 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Building Multimillion-Dollar Business, and these I'll list because they're spread out through the book, rather than all put into one list:

1. A successful business is created before there is a business
2. Learn how to turn bad luck into good luck
3. Know the difference between your job and your work
4. Success reveals your failures
5. The process is more important than the goal
6. The best answers are found in your heart, not your head
7. The scope of the mission determines the product
8. Design a business that can do something that no other business can do
9. Don't fight for the bargain basement
10. Know when to quit

In the book, he actually calls the first nine Sharon's Insights, named after the person he wrote the book with, Sharon Lechter, with whom he co-founded the Rich Dad Organization.

There is a lot one can get from this book. For instance, he has his five jobs every entrepreneur needs to have covered; he has his three biggest mistakes most independent business owners make; he has the six ways an entrepreneur can raise money; on and on. He talks about the Cash Flow Quadrant, which is also another book of his, and I'll admit that I've never quite gotten a hold of the principles of that. One thing I thought was interesting was the transition process that most people go through when they're transitioning from an employee to an entrepreneur. There's stage one, you become unhappy as an employee with 13 steps; stage 2, overcome the fear of getting started with 14 steps; and stage 3, just start, with 10.

Finally, in the last chapter, near the end of the book, he offers ten tips, with explanations, of what people should do before they quit their jobs:

1. Check your attitude
2. Get as much experience as possible on five levels of the B-a Triangle
3. Always remember that Sales = Income
4. Be optimistic as well as brutally honest with yourself
5. How are you at spending money?
6. Start a business to practice on
7. Be willing to ask for help
8. Find a mentor
9. Join an entrepreneur's network
10. Be faithful to the process

There's so much information in Before You Quit Your Job that what I've shared here is really just scraping the barrel. There are many stories in here, and, after I came to grips with the fact that it wasn't going to be Rich Dad, then I was open to learning some of the things he said in this one, even though I had already become an entrepreneur of sorts. I would recommend this book to anyone who's even giving a passing thought to becoming an entrepreneur, and as I've said about the Rich Dad book, I'd give a copy to every college age kid in the world today.

© Reviews of Everything