How to progress through the Cashflow Quadrant

Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant provides a great primer for achieving time and financial freedom. Learn how the writer progressed through the Quadrants.

A couple of years into starting my legal career in the mid 1990s, I read a book, the Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki.

In it, he describes 4 quadrants, made up of people and their mindsets.

The idea is that Cashflow Quadrants 1 and 2 can never attain true wealth and freedom as they will always be working for people in Quadrants 3 and 4:

Cashflow Quadrant 1 – Employee – Values security and looks for a safe, secure job with good benefits

Cashflow Quadrant 2 – Small business owner – Believes that to do something right, you need to do it yourself

Cashflow Quadrant 3 – Big business owner – Leverages the power of good systems, networks, and people to run his business

Cashflow Quadrant 4 – Investor – Leverages other business

I had spent 20 years in Cashflow Quadrant 1, Employee, being a corporate lawyer…

I was handsomely rewarded for it financially.  If I’m going to be blunt about it, it was because I was being leveraged by people in Cashflow Quadrant 3, the Big Business Onwer, and Cashflow Quadrat 4, the Investor.

They needed a “safe pair of hands” in their businesses, and truth be told, nothing made me prouder than to be called that.

Notwithstanding that, after reading the book, I desired to try to get into Cashflow Quadrants 3 and 4…

So, I made the occasional foray to try to get into the Investor quadrant via the stock market, but lost money each time.

Each time I asked myself, with all those years of education, experience working in a couple of the largest listed companies in Singapore, as well as the Singapore Government’s premier investment firm, why could I just not succeed at investing for myself?

The answer hit me over the head – it’s so obvious, you may even wonder why I’m writing this…

It’s “relevance”.  My education and experience were irrelevant to my being in Cashflow Quadrants 3 or 4.  They were designed for me to flourish in Cashflow Quadrants 1 or 2.

I was taught to be a model employee, and if I were to go and start a law firm, a model small business owner.  I was proud to be called a “safe pair of hands” by the people in Cashflow Quadrants 3 and 4 – the Big Business Owners and Investors.  I was simply doing well at what I had been taught to do.

Becoming an Investor isn’t punting in the stock market…

Unfortunately, accessibility to the markets have just given more people, hardworking employees, like I was – false hope and more opportunities to lose our hard earned money.

Experience has taught me that the only way to break free from Cashflow Quadrant 1 and 2, and become successful in Cashflow Quadrants 3 and 4, is to get educated for it…

We all know of people who have succeeded, against the odds, to become successful business owners and investors, without anything other than the formal (Cashflow Quadrant 1 and 2) education that we were given.

They’re the minority.

I’m talking about ordinary people like me, succeeding…

For ordinary people like us, it is a lot easier to succeed at something, once you are taught how to do it.

That’s why so many more people succeed at their careers, rather than in business or investing.

You’re probably wondering where I am in my transition from Cashflow Quadrant 1…

I won’t tell you that I’m at Quadrants 3 or 4, because I’ve not gotten there.  It’s a process of growth.  Jumping from Cashflow Quadrant 1 to 4 in the past was a mistake, which is why I lost money doing it.

I have fully transitioned from Cashflow Quadrant 1 to 2, Employee to Small Business Owner, and am now working with several founders of several multimillion dollar companies to launch my own product, at which point I would have transitioned to Cashflow Quadrant 3.

I could not have done this without the education I received, and the support of an amazing community of entrepreneurs.  I wouldn’t have had access to these founders of multimillion dollar companies if not for this community.

So, if you would like to transition from a life of working for something you will never own, to owning something, and reaping the rewards for it, I’d love to share the steps and training that I took with you.