Robert chooses Rich Dad as his financial mentor

Robert chooses Rich Dad as his financial mentor at the age of nine, turning away from the conventional path urged by Poor Dad to learn how money works and how to make it work for him. The decision begins a thirty-year apprenticeship and frames the book’s central claim: financial education, not money alone, gives a person greater command over wealth and choice.

The Choice Between Two Fathers

Robert grows up with two influential fathers whose advice reflects sharply different views of money and education. Poor Dad, his highly educated real father, encourages him to study hard, earn a degree, and obtain a secure professional job. Rich Dad directs him toward understanding money and building a life in which money works for him. At nine, Robert decides to learn from Rich Dad about money, even though Poor Dad has the college degrees.

The choice is not presented as a simple rejection of education. Both fathers respect learning, but they disagree over what matters most: Poor Dad emphasizes scholastic and professional qualifications, while Rich Dad stresses financial knowledge. Robert’s two sources of advice force him to compare rather than simply accept or dismiss a single authority. He later describes that process of thinking and choosing for himself as more valuable than an unexamined yes or no.

An Apprenticeship in Financial Thinking

After Robert makes his decision, Rich Dad teaches him over a period of thirty years, continuing until Robert is thirty-nine. The lessons, he says, are simple and repeated; their purpose is not to provide ready-made answers but to serve as guideposts for building wealth amid change and uncertainty. The book organizes them into six lessons, beginning with the principle that the rich do not work for money and proceeding through financial literacy, owning one’s business, taxes and corporations, inventing money, and working to learn rather than merely to earn.

One early lesson dramatizes the difference between acting from emotion and thinking through a financial choice. Rich Dad raises his offer of pay to two boys, moving from twenty-five cents an hour to a dollar, two dollars, and finally five dollars. The escalating sums initially stir Robert’s desire for things such as a bicycle and a baseball glove. At five dollars an hour, however, the offer seems so excessive that the temptation falls away; Robert and Mike look at each other, and Robert recognizes that the needy part of him has gone quiet. Rich Dad uses the moment to explain how fear of lacking money and desire for what money can buy can establish a recurring cycle of work, paychecks, and bills—the Rat Race.

Rich Dad’s instruction is not simply to accumulate money. He warns that becoming rich without learning to manage fear and desire can leave someone a highly paid slave. Robert recalls that the discussion widened his view of the trap ahead and taught him to pause rather than let emotion direct his thinking. The financial education he chooses is therefore also an education in how to respond to money.

Lessons Extended into Practice

The mentor’s influence appears in the methods Robert later describes using and teaching. In CASHFLOW, the game he invented as a teaching tool, players follow how income statements and balance sheets interact and how cash flows between them. The aim is to increase monthly cash flow from assets until it exceeds monthly expenses, a point associated with leaving the Rat Race for the Fast Track. The game makes financial relationships visible through decisions and consequences rather than through a lecture alone.

Robert also presents opportunity-seeking as a learned practice. He describes jogging the same neighborhoods repeatedly, watching for changes such as long-standing sale signs or moving trucks, and speaking with postal carriers and retailers to gather information. In one example, he and his wife show a friend a Phoenix townhome offered for $42,000 when similar units cost $65,000. The friend withdraws after a neighbor who was not an investor calls it a bad deal; by 1995, the unit is worth $95,000 and rents for $1,000 a month, or $2,500 in peak winter months. Robert uses the missed opportunity to illustrate how doubt can overrule analysis.

The same emphasis on deliberate learning informs his advice about communication and giving. He argues that technical expertise alone may not translate into success if a person cannot communicate, negotiate, sell, or market; he recommends learning to sell even if it brings no immediate income. He also contrasts Rich Dad’s habit of giving money, including to his church, charities, and foundation, with Poor Dad’s intention to give only when extra money became available. In Robert’s account, Rich Dad’s teaching links generosity with reciprocity and treats teaching itself as a form of giving through which the teacher also learns.

Meaning and Legacy of the Decision

The decision to learn from Rich Dad becomes the organizing choice behind Robert’s account of his financial development. The mentor’s lessons supply a different measure of education from the one Poor Dad offers: not a substitute for schooling, but knowledge about money that Robert says school did not provide. He connects that distinction to the book’s broader concern that financial habits are often learned at home, leaving people with academic or professional skills but little preparation to make financial decisions.

Robert’s later teaching extends the apprenticeship beyond his own experience. He presents games, practical examples, communication skills, and the practice of giving as ways to transmit knowledge to others. The choice at nine thus has two linked consequences in his narrative: it directs his own education for three decades, and it becomes the source of a curriculum he seeks to share with readers and their children.