Where to Start with Robert Kiyosaki: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Robert Kiyosaki — how to approach Rich Dad Poor Dad, his paradigm-shifting reframe of assets, liabilities, and financial literacy that has changed how millions of people think about money. A complete reading guide.
By Marcus Webb
Robert Kiyosaki (born 1947) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and author who self-published Rich Dad Poor Dad in 1997 after failing to find a mainstream publisher. By 2023 it had sold over forty million copies in one hundred and nine countries, making it the best-selling personal finance book in publishing history. Kiyosaki’s background includes service in the US Marine Corps, business ventures of varying success, and a business education shaped by contrasting influences — the conventional professional advice of his father and the entrepreneurial philosophy of his best friend’s father. The book is built around that contrast.
Where to Start: Rich Dad Poor Dad (1997)
The essential Robert Kiyosaki — and the book that launched the personal finance literacy movement for a generation of readers who had not found conventional financial advice adequate. Rich Dad Poor Dad opens with a framework that is simple enough to seem obvious and radical enough to restructure how most readers think about money: the difference between the rich and everyone else is not income. It is what they do with income.
The two dads framework is the book’s narrative engine. Poor Dad — Kiyosaki’s biological father — is highly educated, hardworking, and financially conventional: his advice is to get a good education, find a stable job, buy a house, contribute to a pension. Rich Dad — his best friend’s father, who never finished school but built a business empire — operates from an entirely different set of premises: don’t work for money, make money work for you; understand the difference between assets and liabilities; build passive income rather than depending on salary.
The asset vs liability distinction is the book’s most important and most durable contribution. Kiyosaki defines these terms operationally rather than technically: an asset puts money in your pocket; a liability takes money out. The implication is immediate and widely resisted: your house, which takes money out of your pocket every month in mortgage payments, property taxes, and maintenance, is not an asset. It is a liability. It becomes an asset only when it generates income that exceeds its costs. The distinction reframes most people’s understanding of their own financial position — and not in a flattering direction.
The rat race is Kiyosaki’s name for the trap this creates. Most people follow the conventional path: earn a salary, pay taxes on it, spend what remains on a mortgage, car, and consumer goods, then need to earn more salary to cover more spending. Income rises; expenses expand to match. The treadmill never stops. The exit from the rat race — which Kiyosaki is specific about — is passive income exceeding expenses: reaching the point where assets generate more than you spend, making salary optional.
The book is controversial in its specifics. Some biographical details have been disputed; the specific investment advice is deliberately vague; the dismissal of education and employment as paths to wealth is overdrawn. These are fair criticisms. What they do not address is the book’s core achievement: it changed the question millions of people were asking. Before reading it, most readers were asking how do I earn more? After reading it, they are asking how do I build assets that earn for me? That shift in framing is worth more than many technically correct investment books.
Reading Robert Kiyosaki
Rich Dad Poor Dad is Kiyosaki’s essential and most influential book. It stands alone as a framework text. Read it for the asset-liability reframe and the motivational shift it produces; follow it with technically rigorous books on investment mechanics to translate the philosophy into practice.
For the full Robert Kiyosaki bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Robert Kiyosaki author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Robert Kiyosaki?
Rich Dad Poor Dad (1997) is Kiyosaki's essential book — a framework for thinking about money built around the contrast between two father figures: his own educated but financially conventional father (Poor Dad) and his best friend's father, a self-made entrepreneur (Rich Dad). The book's central contribution is its redefinition of assets and liabilities: an asset puts money in your pocket; a liability takes money out. By this standard, the middle-class assumption that a house is an asset is wrong, and the financial habits of most educated people are working against their long-term interests.
What is Rich Dad Poor Dad about?
Rich Dad Poor Dad argues that what schools teach about money — get a good education, find a safe job, buy a house, work your way up — is inadequate preparation for financial independence. The book contrasts the financial philosophy of the conventional path with the philosophy of the rich: build assets that generate passive income, let those assets buy luxuries rather than buying luxuries on salary, and escape the rat race (the cycle of earning, taxing, spending that keeps most people trapped). The asset vs liability distinction is the book's most practically useful contribution, and the one that has proved most durable.
Is Rich Dad Poor Dad accurate? How should I read it?
With appropriate scepticism about the specifics. Some of Kiyosaki's biographical claims have been disputed, and his specific investment advice is deliberately vague. What the book does well — and does better than any comparable text — is shift the framing question from 'how do I earn more?' to 'how do I build assets that earn for me?' That reframe has proved genuinely useful to millions of readers. Treat it as a motivational framework for thinking about money differently, not as a technical investment guide. Follow it with more rigorous books on investment mechanics.
What should I read after Rich Dad Poor Dad?
After Rich Dad Poor Dad, Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money provides the behavioural layer — why people make the financial decisions they make, and how to avoid the emotional traps that undermine sound strategy. John Bogle's The Little Book of Common Sense Investing covers the practical implementation of passive investing that is the most evidence-backed route to building the assets Kiyosaki advocates. For the real estate side of Kiyosaki's framework, Brandon Turner's The Book on Rental Property Investing provides the specific mechanics.
