Why would you save money when they’re printing trillions of dollars? The gap between the 1% and 99% is massive. It’s not just money; you have to step back and look at the bigger picture.

The Three People Inside Us

In every one of us, there’s a poor person. There’s still a poor person inside me. There’s also a middle-class person, and the middle-class person wants security; they want that steady paycheck. And there’s a rich person. They’re all inside of us, except that it’s not taught. You’re taught to go to school, get a job, and get a paycheck. Not taught how to get rich.

The Paycheck Mindset

If you’ve read Rich Dad Poor Dad, my rich dad refused to pay me. He said the paycheck was one of the most damaging things you can take in your life. He said the moment you take a paycheck, you’re an employee, and that’s the mindset. So my rich dad never paid me. It drove my poor dad, a government employee, nuts. “You got to pay people, you got to pay people.” And Rich Dad was not saying that the paycheck was bad. He said he didn’t want to be a slave to money.

As an entrepreneur, if Rich Dad folded, I’d just try another company. I don’t need a paycheck. I don’t need anybody to take care of me. If my government doesn’t like me, I move to another country because they need entrepreneurs there. So the entrepreneur is not so much the business. The entrepreneur is really the mindset and the skill sets and the different set of rules. A small business does not operate under the same rules as a big business.

An entrepreneur is a mindset first, a skill set, and rules. And depending on whether you’re an employee or a small business, the rules are different, the mindsets are different, the skill sets are different.

The Leap of Faith

If you could say one thing to somebody who’s never been an entrepreneur and they’re thinking about making the leap of faith into becoming an entrepreneur, what could you tell them? I’ll just tell them the same thing that happened to me. My last paycheck, I still remember it clearly. It was one of the worst and the best days of my life. I was in Puerto Rico, working for Xerox, and my boss gave me my last; it wasn’t a paycheck, it was a bonus check, I think it was about $30,000 taxable. That’s the only problem with that. So I get this check, and I went, “Holy mackerel.” I was excited, but I was also disturbed.

Then this other guy comes up to me; his name was John, and John says to me, “You’re going to be back.” I said, “Why?” He says, “Because you’re going to fail.” I looked at him, and I said a few expletive words, because that’s what he did: he left Xerox, failed, and he came back. I said, “You failed, and you came back, but I’m going to fail, and I’m never coming back.” And that’s the attitude.

If you say, “Well, if I fail, I’ll go back to mommy and daddy,” then that’s what you’ll do. So if you fail, that’s when I became an entrepreneur, because I had no money. I had no money for years. I didn’t have a paycheck. But that’s what my rich dad encouraged me to do. He said, when you don’t have a paycheck, you get hungrier, smarter, and it’s a test of your character. Will you become a crook? Will you become dishonest? Will you cheat and steal? Or will you become a better human being? So really, that’s the benefit of becoming an entrepreneur. You really find out who you are when you don’t have anything.

Looking at the Big Picture

You always have to look at the big picture. Too many people look at, “Well, what’s going to happen to me?” When you look at the big picture, you’re also going to know that when something bad happens, something good is going to happen. But you gotta prepare for whatever is coming. If you think the next 20 years will be like the last 20 years, you’re going to get creamed.

When you and I go to the supermarket and we buy a carton of milk, we always check for the expiration date. But most people do not check for the expiration date on their brains.

Debt and Taxes

Instead of getting out of debt, I get into debt. I just refinanced $300 million in debt. I went from 5% to 2.5% interest. I made a fortune. Every month more money comes in because my cost of money has gone down. So while some financial experts are saying get out of debt, I’m saying learn how to use debt.

When I came back from serving in Vietnam in January of ’73, the first thing my rich dad said to me was, “Go to school to learn how to invest in real estate.” It wasn’t real estate; it was how to use debt and taxes. Debt and taxes make the rich richer. Debt and taxes make the poor and middle class poorer.

All the rich guys who are doctors and lawyers, those guys, they’re getting creamed, and they don’t know why. Are doctors getting creamed? Oh yeah, they’re making more money, but the take-home is less. My doctor just yelled at me; he’s happy. He says, “Oh, guess what, I finally made a million dollars.” And I said, “Yeah.” This was just three weeks ago. So I said, “Yeah, well, how much did you pay in taxes?” He says, “$750,000 in taxes.” So his net was about $400,000. That’s not bad, but when I make a million bucks, I keep a million bucks. And the reason is that I don’t make it by working for money. If you work for money, you’re taxed.

The Rich Don’t Work for Money

That’s why lesson number one in Rich Dad Poor Dad is that the rich don’t work for money. What we do instead is we create businesses as entrepreneurs. We acquire real estate. I don’t invest in the stock market. The reason is that as an entrepreneur, I have more control over my income, how much I make, and how much I pay in taxes. And because I’m an entrepreneur as well as an investor in real estate, I pay zero tax.

Every time I make, let’s say, a million dollars as an entrepreneur, I immediately invest it in real estate, and I have a 4-to-1 step-up. So I put a million dollars in real estate, and I get four million from the bank. That’s why I love banks. But the banks are screwing everybody else, you know, terrible, but it’s good for me. terribly

When they print, it’s good for me, but when they print, it’s bad for people who work for money. Because when you print, savers get creamed and people who work for money get creamed. When they print, debtors get rich. Debt and taxes make the rich richer, and debt and taxes make the poor and middle class poorer.

Obsolete Ideas, Obsolete Results

When we have obsolete ideas, we get obsolete results. So what’s happening for most people is the idea of going to school, getting a job, working hard, saving money, getting out of debt, buying your house because it’s an asset, and investing for the long term. It’s obsolete. The world has changed. The world changed in 1971 when President Nixon took us off the gold standard and money became debt.

What if we get rid of school? Then what would happen? Would it be better if we had no educational system at all? No, I’m saying education was more important before; it’s just obsolete. There’s Moore’s law, which states that information doubles every 18 months. In other words, everything is obsolete every 18 months. And this is a recent phenomenon. So when you come out of school, you’re already obsolete. That’s why I’m the old guy. I meet my friends, “I went to Harvard.” Yeah, I went to Harvard. I said, “Yeah, that was how long, 50 years ago?”

Savers Are Losers

Today, the banks are charging you interest to save money. In other words, the banks don’t want your money because they’ve printed too much of it. That’s why there are bubbles in stocks and bubbles in real estate and all this. People are dumping the cash. Because, as I said, “Savers are losers and cash is trash.” And yet people are like, “Well, I want a high-paying job.” Well, that’s an obsolete idea. Get out of debt; it’s an obsolete idea. You should learn how to get into debt. How to use debt to get rich. And they’ll never teach you about taxes.

The reason the 1% is way up here, and the 99% are going this way, is that when you print money, two things happen: inflation and taxes. It’s crushing them. And any entrepreneur that thinks, “I’m just going to make money and start a business and make a lot of money,” that’s what we talk about; they really have got to smell the roses, man. That’s not what the real entrepreneurs are doing.

The Reality of Entrepreneurship

Most entrepreneurs — there are28 million small business owners in America. 24 million are one-person entrepreneurs. They’re called non-employee entrepreneurs. That’s what happens when people don’t really understand what an entrepreneur does. So most people are self-employed, but they’re not really entrepreneurs. The self-employed pay the highest taxes of all, and nobody tells them that.

It’s also called the entrepreneurial spirit, but what we’re actually talking about is that there’s no such thing as a bad economy. You and I, we all have an external economy. But we also have an internal economy, and the willpower is to change our internal economy. So for me, I can see the good, I can see the bad; I don’t really give a damn. Because I’m going to be rich anyway. But a poor person with a poor personal economy, all they’re going to see is a bad economy. Because they don’t know how to make money in any economy. And a middle-class person, they have a middle-class economy. You know what they want? A nice house, a steady paycheck, the job, and the car. And so when you take their job away from them, that’s disaster. Well, since an entrepreneur doesn’t have a job anyway, it’s no big deal.

Internal vs. External Focus

All I’m saying to people is what Buckminster Fuller taught me. There are always two sides, to use the plural, at minimum two. So if you think the economy is bad, it’s because your economy is bad. If you think that steady employment is important, then you’ll see an economy without jobs.

Your economy versus the external economy. Where you control versus where you can’t control. I can control, yes, it’s called an internal focus versus an external focus. So the real entrepreneur has an internal focus. But if they fall, they say, “Oh, this is good because I’m getting up to go higher.” The average person will fall and say, “Oh, I’m going to take some Prozac.” Or somebody has the mistakes; all the mistakes don’t matter. Well, mistakes matter. It means you didn’t know something. But a real entrepreneur, whether they fall or they go, can always get up. They can stand back up and go higher. No matter what happens to them, they get stronger and better and smarter and happier.

But a person with a weak internal mindset, they’re so afraid of what happens; it generally happens. Like people who are afraid of losing their jobs, they generally lose their jobs. So everything comes through you. The entrepreneur’s first job is control inside here, not outside there. The moment you take that paycheck, you’re an employee. You’ve got to be stronger than that. It’s about inside control.

That is exactly why so many dates feel like job interviews instead of sparks flying. The second you hide behind safe questions like “What do you do?” you have already surrendered. If you do not catch yourself, you will lose the spark before the conversation even begins. Here are three ways to talk to your crush as if a master of power were teaching you how to win over a kingdom.

Stop Asking, Start Inferring

Most people think asking questions is the easiest way to keep a conversation alive. But that actually kills attraction. It is easy to fall back on those safe questions like “What do you do for fun?” But all that does is push the weight of the conversation onto the other person. Suddenly, it feels less like a date and more like a job interview. Anyone can do that. What creates real attraction is not asking. It is inferring.

When you infer, you make educated guesses about someone based on what they give you- their vibe, how they look, what they have told you. This does three really powerful things all at once. It makes the conversation more fun because guessing is playful. It makes it more dangerous because you put skin in the game. You can be wrong, which raises tension. And it makes you more present because you are not waiting to fire off the next canned question. You are actually observing.

For example, instead of asking “Do you like your job?” you could notice the way they roll their eyes when work comes up and point to their computer screen and say, “You look like you’re over it.” That is an inference, and it is playful. It sparks emotion and makes the other person want to respond.

A wise man once wrote that men in general judge more by the eye than by the hand. For everyone can see, but few can touch. In other words, most people just notice the surface. They take things at face value, and they stop there. They ask the boring questions over and over again. That is why their conversations feel stuck. That is why they are pushed into the friend zone. But when you actually observe, when you take what is on the surface and go deeper with an inference, you break out of the ordinary. You flip the script. You start sounding like a rare person who actually sees. That is what creates tension, spark, and presence.

Attraction dies when you are collecting facts. But it grows when you take the risk and say, “Hey, here is what I noticed about you.”

Bring Energy and Rev Up Your Presence

Have you ever seen those Japanese motorbikes that can rev up to crazy RPMs? Being attractive is just as simple as turning the bike’s handle and revving up your engine. Having the ability to rev your personality up in an instant to crazy RPMs is one of the most underrated and secret techniques in dating and attraction.

The truth is, you are not always going to feel your best. Some days you are tired or stressed or caught up in your own head. But in a world full of people who hate their jobs, hate their friends, hate their life, who commute slowly through life like half-dead engines, the person who revs up, who listens with real presence, who fills a room with laughter, that person wakes other people up from their slumber, from the monotony of everyday life.

A thinker writing five hundred years ago noticed something simple but powerful. The people who move others are not the cautious ones.

They are the ones who act boldly and take risks. He famously wrote that fortune favors the bold. That is the same in conversation. People are not drawn to hesitation. They are drawn to a spark. The person who brings life into a room, who shakes them out of autopilot, who makes them feel more alive just by being there. Looks may turn someone’s head in the moment, but energy is what makes people remember you.

Hold Tension and Embrace Disagreement

Once you have got a little momentum in a conversation, you are going to be met with challenges and disagreement. Your initial reaction could be, “Oh no, it’s over. This person doesn’t like me.” But that is wrong. Disagreement is good in a conversation. It means that you are worth giving an opinion to, a real opinion, a real thought.

Not being met with disagreement is what I call being hit with an onion.

An onion, like a conversation, has a lot of layers. It is bad when you get hit with the surface layer because the surface layer is full of small talk and friend zones. You want to go deeper and occupy those deeper layers of the conversational onion. To do that, your crush is going to naturally challenge you and challenge your frame to see if you are worth being there.

Attraction does not grow when you comply. It grows when you hold tension and play with it. A master of power would back this up. In his famous work, he wrote that it is much safer to be feared than loved if one must choose. Not because cruelty wins hearts, but because people respect strength more than surrender. The same principle applies in conversation. When someone pushes back, it is not rejection. It is a test. If you collapse and throw away your opinion, you lose weight. But if you hold your frame or even double down with humor, you prove that you are worth taking seriously. That is why small talk dies on the surface.

But playful disagreement feels alive. Attraction does not grow in compliance. It grows in tension, in the play between two strong people, between two strong frames.

Be Alive in the Moment

In the end, most people lose their crush’s interest within the first sentence. Not because they are not good enough, but because they play it safe. They hide behind small talk, low energy, and quick agreement. The truth is, connection and attraction do not come from being perfect. They come from being alive in the moment, making inferences, bringing energy, and holding tension. Your crush won’t remember the facts you traded back and forth. They will remember the spark that you brought to the room. If you do that, you will not just be noticed. You will be unforgettable.