Dear Mr. Reed,

I wanted to take the time to thank you for your work creating your web site. I find the commentary on your site, particularly the commentary about Robert Kiyosaki, to be very useful.

I’ve been reading Robert’s books for a number of years now and as time went on I became more and more skeptical about what he had to say. As with every guru, some of what he said made sense to me and that translated on my part into an unhealthy sense of belief in everything else he had to say.

After reading every single book written by Robert and his partner I can’t think of a single piece of advice from any of his books written after “The Cashflow Quadrant” that didn’t borrow extremely heavily from one of his first two books.

I’ve probably spent hours on end reading the distilled advice of “Rich Dad” and I’m becoming more and more certain that I’m not one bit wiser for having read close to twenty books.

It should be noted I’m a fairly voracious reader and it probably doesn’t take me as long as it would take some people to read through each “Rich Dad” book, I finished one recently on four hour plane ride. It was during that plane ride that I became convinced there was something extremely fishy about Kiyosaki’s advice. It was his book written with Donald Trump however that pushed me over the edge about his advice. In “We Want You To Be Rich” both Donald and Robert highly recommend multi-level marketing businesses as a way to learn the skills you need to succeed in business. Immediately upon reading this the warning light finally went off in my head. This poor little warning light should have gone off a long time ago.

A recommendation to “learn to sell” through multi level marketing seemed like some of the worst financial advice I had ever heard in my life. I’ve studied MLM’s in an attempt to wrestle friends form their clutches in the past and now to hear someone I respected touting a thing that is almost always a scam left me feeling empty. It’s that empty feeling you get when you realize that you’ve been taken for a ride.

Having needed to once again brush up on some anti-mlm advice for someone who was being taken in by Quixstar/Amway I happened to run across a link to you criticism of Rich Dad Poor Dad. I must say the experience was eye opening. To see advice that I had until so recently respected torn open in such an honest and forthright manner was an interesting experience.

I hope that I have grown from this experience and I sincerely hope that you continue to maintain your website. I’ve fond more practical information on your website in one day (I just found your website today) that I think I’ve gotten out of the entire Rich Dad series of books. You’ve made me take an honest look at why I was picking up so many of the same kinds of books at the library.

I’ll close by thanking you again for running your website. I hope to be able to turn on as many people as possible to your clear advice about “financial gurus”.

Sincerely,

Anthony Petruccione
Amarillo, TX