In general, I suspect all members of the financial education market,
from authors to radio talk show hosts and everyone in between. When I
obtain financial independence, I don’t plan on teaching anyone but my
own friends and family. Why would anyone do otherwise except to fleece
the public?
And then, having said that, I realize that every single book I’ve
written, I wrote because I had a burning story to tell; I couldn’t not
write it. My motivation to write novels is grounded in my need to take
my writing into a completely different direction w/o the requirement of
generating an income stream. So it’s likely that at least *some* of the
folks in the financial education market are in it for love, but how can
you tell which ones?
Further, it’s not generally true that “them that know, don’t
tell.”
I know that I know how to write real software and how the technologies
that form the topics of my writings and teachings really work, so at the
very least, I’m the exception to that rule. However, there are an awful
lot of exceptions, like all of my friends in the Windows developer
education industry, so I reject the rule out of hand for at least a
significant percentage of participants in any given field of education
(certainly a significant percentage of them conform to the rule, of
course, and those are likely to out number the ones that are the
exception).
However, all of us in the Windows developer education industry make
our living on education, not on the technology itself. We’ve chosen
education because it’s more lucrative then being a practitioner. (This
may help explain why elementary school teachers choose their field: can you
think of a place that they can make more money on basic readin’, ‘ritin’
and ’rithmatic than as a teacher?)
So, if it’s the case that education is more lucrative than practice,
why should I buy someone’s financial book, since they’ve obviously
decided that selling me a book is more profitable than practicing what
they’re preaching. Further, the real-time markets have the built-in
handicap that when a technique for really making money is widely put
into use, the market adjusts for it, bringing the returns for that
technique back in line with the market as a whole. If I discovered a new
way to make real money, publishing how it works is the last thing that I
want to do. Definitely, those kinds of books, like The Motley Fool’s
Investment Guide, are not what I want to put my trust into.
Things I find I can trust more are books that inspire me, like Rich
Dad, Poor Dad, or change the way I look at things, like Fooled by
Randomness, or help me to establish a foundation of knowledge, like
Investing for Dummies or Learn to Earn. These are books that don’t
promise to make me rich (except the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books, but I’ve
learned to discount that promise : ), but that help me align my brain
cells so that I can take control of my own financial health.
So, all of this boils down to “Be a skeptic” from the Epilogue to
Effective COM, furthering my belief that the ability to learn how
one system works, e.g. COM, can be effectively translated into learning
how another system works, e.g. investing. And so what’s my motivation
for this writing and others like it? It’s purely selfish, I assure you.
Writing something clarifies my thinking and posting it gets me access
to, and feedback from, like-minded folks that can help clarify my
thinking even more.
