The nine-year-old who got paid nothing on purpose

Nine-year-old Robert sat in a musty living room, waiting. Two women he didn't know slid down the couch to make room for him. An older man had just left. He had been sitting there for forty-five minutes on a bright Hawaiian Saturday, working himself into a fury, ready to march in and quit the job he had begged for only weeks earlier: dusting canned goods for ten cents an hour at one of his friend's father's little grocery stores.

When he finally got in to see the man he later called his rich dad, he unloaded everything. You lied to me. You haven't taught me anything. I want a raise or I quit. Rich dad rocked back in his chair and said, calmly, not bad, in less than a month you sound like most of my employees.

That was the point. Rich dad had paid the boys almost nothing on purpose, not out of stinginess but to let them feel, in miniature, exactly what most adults feel every payday: the letdown of working hard for a little bit of money that never quite covers what you wanted. Then he made an even stranger move. Instead of raising the pay, he cut it to zero, and when the boy protested, he tapped him on the head and said, use this.

Kiyosaki calls this his first lesson: the poor and the middle class work for money, while the rich have money work for them. Most people, he argues, spend a lifetime chasing paychecks because fear is doing their thinking for them, the fear of not covering the bills, and later greed does the rest, the desire for whatever a bigger paycheck can buy. Rich dad called this cycle the Rat Race, and he wanted the boys to see it from outside before they ever stepped into it.

Working for nothing forced Robert and his friend Mike to stop waiting for a wage and start looking for their own opportunity. They found one in a pile of discarded comic-book covers a store clerk was throwing away, and turned it into a small lending library that earned them money whether or not they were standing there. It wasn't the ten cents an hour, or even the zero, that made the difference. It was learning to see money as something you could create rather than something you waited to receive.

Notice, this week, the exact moment you feel that flash of fear or desire around money, the flash that makes you say I need this job or I have to have that, and instead of acting on it right away, sit with it for a minute and ask what it's really telling you. Then, rather than only asking how you can earn more at your current job, look for one small opportunity nearby that could work for you even when you're not there, the way a nine-year-old once turned a pile of used comic books into a little library that ran itself. Start it small, keep your day job while you do, and watch how differently the money feels once it starts coming from something you built instead of something you clocked into.