Page 147 - Rich Dad's Increase Your Financial IQ: Get Smarter with Your Money

The Most Important Asset

A friend of mine who is a Bible scholar often says, “Without knowledge,
my people will perish.” Today many people are perishing because they are
without knowledge about money. We live in the Information Age. Even in

very remote areas of the world, I have seen young people text messaging
while at the same time riding the family’s donkey cart. Never before has the
entire world been so connected so quickly.
Information is the single greatest asset of this era. In previous ages, you

owned factories, cattle ranches, gold mines, oil wells, or skyscrapers to be
rich. In the Information Age, information alone can make you very rich.
You don’t need tangible resources like land, gold, or oil. The young
entrepreneurs who created MySpace and YouTube have proved that. With

just a few dollars, some information, and the leverage of technology, these
twenty-year-olds have become billionaires.
Likewise, poor or mistaken information is a liability. Poor information
creates poor people. One of the reasons so many people are struggling

financially is simply because they have obsolete, biased, misleading, or
erroneous information powering their most powerful asset, their brain.
Many people who are struggling are doing so because they are using
Industrial or Agrarian Age information in the Information Age. Examples

of Industrial Age information are ideas such as, “I need a good education to
get a high-paying job.” An example of Agrarian Age information is, “Land
is the basis of all wealth.”

The Four Ages of Humanity

There have been four economic ages of humanity:

1. The Hunter-Gatherer Age. During this period nature provided the

wealth. Tribes followed herds or searched for food. If you knew how to
hunt and gather you survived. If you did not, you died. The tribe was social
security. Socioeconomically, everyone was even. The chief didn’t have a
higher standard of living than the rest of the tribe. He may have eaten first