Criticism of AmWay, HerbaLife and Kiyosaki’s followers in general

Motto “Man speaks about what he doesn’t live”

I am reading Kiyosaki’s famous book Rich Dad, Poor Dad and I find it very inspiring. Kiyosaki is also the author of board game Cashflow. Both book and game are very good. But to play the game I had to find someone who has it. I met a group of people studying Kiyosaky’s books. They were members of some company but I did not find the actual name. I was told that the name is changing quite often, and that there is no single company but whole family of companies. They claim not to be AmWay or HerbaLife, because of the bad name these two companies gained in the past, but the principle behind this one is very similar.  For simplicity’s sake I will call these people Kiyosaky’s followers.

These people have one thing in common: They all dream about getting rich effortlessly. They promise you that your income will double in a few years for just one or two hours work a day. They promise it will not be just double, but multiple times higher than it is now. That’s very tempting, isn’t it? Who would not want it? But it is just an illusion. I think that most people from HerbaLife-like companies will never get rich. Here is why.

Bad Motivation

HerbaLife people want to get rich without actually creating anything valuable. They dream about driving a fancy car, getting up at 10 o’clock and living in Hawaii in a financial freedom. The don’t dream about running a startup, inventing something useful, building an killer app or contributing to the world. They are in fact just lazy dreamers.

Premature Satisfaction

You will be told on their meetings to tell your dreams aloud. I advise you not to do it. Because if you do and people will like your dream, they will tell you how great your dream is and how high-potential person your are. But you have not yet created anything and yet you have already received some kind of satisfaction. This will decrease your motivation to actually pursue your dream and full fill it. It is better if you just (humbly) write your dream down only for your self. Make a personal commitment  and follow it daily. Only after you have kept doing it for lets say half a year, and feel strong enough, tell someone about it. But only to small group of good friends who know you really trust. Don’t go public too early.

Creating money out of nothing

This is one of the things I don’t like about Kiyosaki. In one chapter he explains how he created lot of money out of nothing by buying confiscated house for a fraction of its price and selling it shortly afterwards for full price. He earned about 60 000$ in 5 hours. At the risk of being old fashioned I think this is kind of immoral. I understand that if he had not done than someone else would have. I am not naive, this world is hard and it will always be. But is it right to get rich on someone else’s misfortune? Do you have the stomach for it? If you do you are likely to become a rich asshole.

 

In general I agree with most of what Kiyosaki says, especially with his opinion on our educational system, but I just cant buy his idea of “creating money out of nothing”. Money comes out of people’s labour. Even if you invest in stocks or own a company. If you just create money (read “make money”), you are not creating something valuable but only green papers.