Midas Touch

August 22, 2011
Magnate Trump and Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad) are the gold standard of the entrepreneurial spirit—self-made, resilient, and charismatic. But they might also just be the saviors of the economy, as they argue in this follow-up to 2006’s We Want You to Be Rich. They claim that our educational system is failing people by training them to be employees, not entrepreneurs: students make good grades by making the fewest mistakes, when they should be learning to take chances and bounce back from their failures. Trump and Kiyosaki’s five-point plan to developing the “Midas Touch”—the necessary skills to become a successful entrepreneur—includes strength of character, focus, the power of a brand, =relationships, and the little things. They tell humanizing stories of both their successes—Kiyosaki getting his start on Oprah—and setbacks, as when he discovered he was unknowingly operating a sweatshop. This galvanizing narrative skews a bit toward mantra-like big ideas rather than executable steps, but is nonetheless an impassioned argument for business self-actualization.