And while I am glad people have been getting richer and richer, I only caution that in the long run, it's not how much you make, it's how much you keep, and how many generations you keep it. So when people ask, "Where do I get started?" or 'Tell me how to get rich quick," they often are greatly disap- pointed with my answer. I simply say to them what my rich dad said back to me when I was a little kid. "If you want to be rich, you need to be financially literate." That idea was drummed into my head every time we were together. As I said, my educated dad stressed the im- portance of reading books, while my rich dad stressed the needjomaster financial lijgigcy- If you are going to build the Empire State Building, the first thing you need to do is dig a deep hole and pour a strong foundation. If you are going to build a home in the suburbs, all you need to do is pour a 6-inch slab of con- crete. Most people, in their drive to get rich, are trying to build an Empire State Building on a 6-inch slab. Our school system, having been created in the Agrarian Age, still believes in homes with no foundation. Dirt floors are still the rage. So kids graduate from™3ehool with virtu- ally no financial foundation. One day, sleepless and deep in debt in suburbia, living the American Dream, they de- cide that the answer to their financial problems is to find a way to get rich quick. Construction on the skyscraper begins. It goes up quickly, and soon, instead of the Empire State Building, we have the Leaning Tower of Suburbia. The sleepless nights return. As for Mike and me in our adult years, both of our choices were possible because we were taught to pour a strong financial foundation when we were just kids. Now, accounting is possibly the most boring subject in the world. It also could be the mostconfusing. But if you want to be rich, long term, it could be the most important subject. The question is, how do you take a boring and confusing subject and teach it to kids? The answer is, make it simple. Teach it first in pictures. My rich dad poured a strong financial foundation for Mike and me. Since we were just kids, he created a simple way to teach us. For years he only drew pictures and used words. Mike and I understood the simple drawings, the jar- gon, the movement of money, and then in later years, rich dad began adding numbers. Today, Mike has gone on to master much more complex and sophisticated accounting analysis because he has had to. He has a billion-dollar em- pire to run. I am not as sophisticated because my empire is smaller, yet we come from the same simple foundation. In the following pages, I offer to you the same simple line drawings Mike's dad created for us. Though simple, those drawings helped guide two little boys in building great sums of wealth on a solid and deep foundation. Rule One. You must know the difference between an asset and a liabilitynd buy_assets.