If you are going to get rich, you may have to give up everything you ever learned in school and from your parents and start from scratch. Now that’s not a definite by any means. You may not have to start over. If someone along the line taught you, for instance that it doesn’t actually take money to make money, then you may already be on the right track.

That’s right. Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Dad book series, said it exactly like this: “It doesn’t take money to make money. I often hear people say it takes money to make money. I disagree. We had no money when we started and we were also in debt. It also doesn’t take a formal education.”

He then mentioned Bill Gates as someone who never completed a college education. Which would you rather have, a collection of doctorates or Bill Gates’ money?

Robert Kiyosaki claims that to become wealthy, you simply need to be a quick learner, with enthusiasm about reaching your goals. The other part of the puzzle is to know where you’re at right now in relation to money, and how you will have to change your attitude about money to prosper in the future. This is where Kiyosaki’s Cash Flow Quadrant comes in.

The Cash Flow Quadrant is an icon taught to him by his best friend’s father, a man to whom he refers in his books as his “rich dad.” It is an illustration of what his rich dad called the four different types of people in relation to money: Employees, the Self-employed, Businesspeople and Investors. Each quadrant comes with its own outlook on the world. The outlook of those in the B and I quadrants are the ones that help make them rich.

What Robert Kiyosaki means when he says that in order to build wealth, you need to be a quick learner, is that you must learn the ropes of investing. Following in the steps of “Rich Dad,” Kiyosaki himself invested in real estate– a great choice for anyone considering investing, as so much depends on it. In his “Rich Dad,” book, he points out how many of Hawaii’s businesses were located on land owned by Rich Dad.

But he doesn’t just mean you have to learn the nuts and bolts of investing. You do have to learn about those things, at least to the point that you are able to intelligently choose a professional to help you with your investments. But more importantly than that, you have to learn how to think like an investor, and possibly a bit like a business person too.

That is a far cry from thinking like a Self-employed person. According to Kiyosaki, a self-employed person is someone who owns a job, not a business. You don’t own a true business, he said, unless you can leave it for a year and return to find it still making money for you. Businesspeople, he said, know better than to try to do everything themselves. In order to save time and money, they hire people to do the things they can’t do or don’t have time to do. That’s why hiring a qualified real estate professional to guide you in your decisions can be a good investment in and of itself.

At the end of the day, you only really need to have a certain level of knowledge regarding the ins and outs of real estate, and the experts you hire can guide you the rest of the way. If you take one thing from reading this article, let it be this: if you aspire to be rich, it’s time for you to make the move to the ‘I’ quarter of the Cash Flow Quadrant.