He calls himself a terrible writer, yet he's a best-selling author

A young reporter in Singapore once sat across from Robert Kiyosaki with a legal pad, telling him she dreamed of becoming a best-selling author. Her writing, he thought, was genuinely good. So he offered a suggestion: a friend of his ran a sales training school, and taking a course there might help her career.

She stiffened immediately. Are you saying I should go to school to learn to sell? She had a master's degree in English literature, she told him. She'd trained specifically so she'd never have to be a salesperson. The interview ended shortly after, and she packed up her notes and left.

Before she went, Kiyosaki pointed to something she had written on her own pad without noticing: Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author. He told her, it says best-selling author, not best-writing author. I am a terrible writer. You are a great writer. I went to sales school. You have a master's degree. Put them together and you get a best-selling author and a best-writing author.

The exchange sits at the center of one of Kiyosaki's more counter-intuitive arguments. Schools reward specialization: doctors head toward orthopedics or pediatrics, accountants and lawyers narrow their focus, and the assumption is that going deep in one skill is the path to being paid more. Kiyosaki's rich dad pushed the opposite idea. You want to know a little about a lot, he told the boys, and for years put them through his accounting department, his sales floor, his construction sites, and his meetings with bankers and lawyers, not to make them experts in any one area but to make them fluent across all of them.

Kiyosaki argues that the two most underrated skills, regardless of profession, are selling and marketing: the ability to communicate an idea to another person clearly enough that they act on it. A doctor, an artist, or a writer who is brilliant at their craft but can't sell it or explain its value often earns far less than their talent would suggest, while someone with a more modest craft paired with strong communication skills routinely earns more. His advice to the reporter was concrete: take courses in copywriting and public relations, even work at an advertising agency for less pay than the newspaper offered, because the education would be worth more over a working life than the extra salary.

Pick one skill outside your specialty that would multiply the value of what you already do well, the way sales multiplied a good writer's chances of becoming a published one, and commit to learning just the basics of it this month, through a book, a short course, or simply watching someone good at it work. While you do, keep your current job or craft going rather than abandoning it, because the goal is to add a skill on top of what you already have, not to replace it. Pay particular attention to communication, writing, speaking, and negotiating, since these tend to multiply the value of almost any other skill you hold. Notice, over the following months, whether opportunities that once felt closed to you start to open.