A Business School Lesson

"It´s a very strange book. Every time when you read it, the amount of text has somehow increased." says my friend when I tell her that I am reading Robert Kiyosaki´s Business School one more time (Finnish translation ISBN: 952-468-097-1) .

What have I learnt now? No matter what you want to achieve, you had better be prepaired for rejection. Especially if you want to achieve something people think to be beyond the borders of normality, you will experience very uncomfortable feelings of rejection. Nobody wants to be rejected. It feels uncomfortable. That is why we limit ourselves, we stop trying to achieve anyhting of great personal importance and little by little we give up our dreams. They start getting smaller and smaller to fit inside the borders of what people in general understand to be normal.

Kiyosaki´s advice for avoiding the death of personal dreams is paradoxical. He says that it is just because being rejected feels so unpleasant that we need to look for rejection - supposing you really want your dream to come true. We should be like dandelions in my Slavonic garden. There are a lot of them. In spring-summer they greet me happily here and there. When summer comes they more or less hide away. Only when I have mowed the lawn, feel very content with myself and look back at the result of my work do I see hundreds of individual leaves of dandelions like small Statues of Liberty waving to me: "Happily alive!"

In Finland we have eight seasons. Spring-summer, kevätkesä, is almost everybody´s favourite. It is the time when days are getting longer and longer. Just now the summer is turning towards autumn-summer, syyskesä. When you look at the apple trees you can see that the apples are getting their individual chracteristics. Some are turning red, others yellowish red and some remain green. When the south of Europe is getting ready for their holidays in August, we are returning from holidays to the normal working life routines. In two weeks´ time children will go back to school. Before that happens we get occasional, but regular showers. The sun is shining, it may be warm and all of a sudden it is as if you were standing in a shower.



Have you ever analysed what happens when an object gets a hold of you, when you start wanting to have that specific object? I find that very interesting. You probably have some kind of idea where that kind of catching objects are located. I know some people who have to avoid places where there are handbags or shoes. If they enter those places a couple of handbags beg to come home with them or a pair of shoes might whisper that they may not feel comfortable when walking, but they look very beautiful in the bookshelf. A friend of mine has a beautiful pair of high-heeled Italian shoes on her tv-set, just to look at.

I need to avoid bookshops and art galleries if I want to be sure that no catching objects will get a hold of me. Avoiding art galleries is easier than walking by a bookshop. It does not matter, because books are for learning, earning and living. The money spent on them is deductable in the Finnish taxation system, provided you need the books for earning your living, as I do.

Works of art send us the same expensive signal as books do. They tell us about the abundancy of energy, excessive strength and overflow of vitality - we are here not just to survive, we are here to remind one another of the richness and affluence of life. Today these messages were to be heard on the market place in the city centre. I can relatively easily avoid entering art galleries and exhibitions, but now I was caught by a surprise.

We are having a special Flower Week in Tampere now. There are special flower arrangements in town as well as special events. My friend Leena wanted to go to the city centre, because several art galleries and individual artists had brought mainly graphic art into the market place in the centre - inspite of the occasional showers.

In principle I am broke just now. However, the special feature of the catching objects is that they do not feel any mercy on you. It does not matter if you are broke or not. They just want to come with you. First we decided with my mother to buy a Christmas present for my son Samuli and paid fifty-fifty for it.

Then there was another unique piece of graphic that insisted on coming into my house. I resisted actively. But do you know what this piece of art did - it started using my friend Leena as a negotiator. It made Leena tell me that Robert Kiyosaki says in his book Business School that there are special moments when you need to give yourself the prize first and then after that do the work. It was exactly at that moment when I decided to follow Kiyosaki´s advice. I bought that specific work of art. - It has come into my house. It is special. It is unique. It tells about the abundancy and overflow of energy and vitality in the way all expensive signals do, but anyway I am reading Kiyosaki´s Business School to find out if he really says that the prize should be taken before the work is done. And if he says so, I want to know how often it can be done.