Concept
Owning a job
Owning a job is Kiyosaki's description of the self-employed trap: many people who leave employment to work for themselves end up with a business that cannot run a single day without them, so they have changed their boss but not the fact that income stops when they stop.
In the cashflow quadrant, the S stands for self-employed, small business owner and specialist: the consultant, the dentist, the shop owner who does most of the work personally. Kiyosaki points out that many of them value independence and doing the job right themselves, which is admirable, but the result is often longer hours than any employee, no holidays, and no business to sell, because the business is the person. The test is simple: if you were ill for a month, would revenue continue? Owning a job is not a failure; for many people it is a good life and better than employment. The point is to choose it knowingly. If the goal is income that continues without you, the work must slowly shift from doing everything yourself to writing down how it is done, training others and building a system. Michael Gerber makes a similar argument about working on the business, not only in it.
A real-life example
Hande runs a successful pastry shop in Trabzon and bakes almost everything herself. When she breaks her wrist, the shop closes for five weeks. Back at work, she writes recipes and routines down, trains an assistant on three bestsellers, and tests a week where she only supervises. Revenue dips slightly but the shop stays open.
How to use it
- 1Ask whether your business would earn anything if you were away for a month.
- 2Write down how one core task is done, step by step, so someone else could do it.
- 3Train one person on that task and step back for a week to test it.