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Posted about 6 years ago

Thinking Different from How We are Taught!

This is somewhat of a continuation on “ The 6 Hours that Changed How I Think!” post. In that post I only really explained what changed the way I think, and not how or why. So I hope to shed a little more light on it now.

The Rich Dad, Poor Dad book may have started us on this journey, but it’s no sacred text that holds all the answers. I would say it's more of a puzzle box, showing you what the bigger picture is and how some of the pieces go together, but that's about it. Which honestly is ok, for where is the fun in having everything laid out for you? And if it did claim to know all the answers, I don’t think we would have taken to it as so many others have.

Now I know, at this point you must be thinking, “Ok Stuart we get it. It’s a good book, but how and why did it change your thinking?” Well to be honest, I don’t really remember. There wasn’t an AHA moments where suddenly everything made sense and I then knew how to change my life.

For at the same time as going through the book, I was attending business school, which as it says, is about learning how businesses run and what you need to know to work at one. But here, I had a book that almost went against everything I had learnt, and funny enough it made more sense to me.

Sure, accounting, finance, and all those business things are important and I do not discount them, but the idea of working till retirement in the hopes of having made and saved enough money to live the rest of your life happy, just didn't’ make sense or even seem possible. And, sure I work that typical 9-to-5 job now, but only because it has opportunities that I need to do what I want later.

After realizing that the normal life trajectory just wasn’t for me, I went into a bit of a frenzy. Trying to find what will be the next hotness and how to get ahead of the curve, chasing those instant success stories. It got to the point where I was learning to code on the side and attending hackathons in the hopes of building that next $1,000,000 app. Which could have been a thing, as I was part of a team at a Las Vegas hackathon that built one of the first chatbots. However, I was way out of my league technically, and as much as I can envision what needs to be built, it just didn't have what I needed.

I needed to learn more. To understand what makes success happen in life, and how to obtain it. We spend all of our young life learning in a system designed for traditional life, and now I had one text telling me differently, that there is a different way to live and be something more. However, dropping everything in the pursuit of that new life wasn’t for me either. I needed more information, more understanding, and a solid plan on how to execute it.

What really changed in the way I think was the realization that the system of life has been designed so that the wealthy stay wealthy and the poor stay poor, and only by playing the game differently will you ever be able to get out.

In closing, this saying sits on my desk: “Live the Life Others Won’t, to Live the Life Others Can’t.” It’s an annotation to something I heard and a constant reminder that we’re working for something bigger.

~Stuart (Original post on personal blog)


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