Quotes from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is living fully and just existing.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“With no clear picture of how you wish your life to be, how on earth are you going to live it? What is your Primary Aim? Where is the script to make your dreams come true? what is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another. In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves? As a result, most of us scramble about hungrily seeking distraction, in music, in television, in people, in drugs. And most of all we seek things. Things to wear and things to do. Things to fill the emptiness. Things to shore up our eroding sense of self. Things to which we can attach meaning, significance, life. We’ve fast become a world of things. And most people are being buried in the profusion. What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. A place in which being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential. A place where the generally disorganized thinking that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result. A place where discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise and action, of being what you are intentionally instead of accidentally. A place that replaces the home most of us have lost. That’s what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it. Carlos Castaneda”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Most people today are not getting what they want. Not from their jobs, not from their families, not from their religion, not from their government, and, most important, not from themselves. Something is missing in most of our lives. Part of what’s missing is purpose. Values. Worthwhile standards against which our lives can be measured. Part of what’s missing is a Game Worth Playing.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The work we do is a reflection of who we are. If we’re sloppy at it, it’s because we’re sloppy inside. If we’re late at it, it’s because we’re late inside. If we’re bored by it, it’s because we’re bored inside, with ourselves, not with the work. The most menial work can be a piece of art when done by an artist. So the job here is not outside of ourselves, but inside of ourselves. How we do our work becomes a mirror of how we are inside.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Most salespeople think that selling is “closing.” It isn’t. Selling is opening.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Tolerance for failure is a very specific part of the excellent company culture—and that lesson comes directly from the top. Champions have to make lots of tries and consequently suffer some failures or the organization won’t learn. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. In Search of Excellence”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are. Aldous Huxley”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“And what makes people work is an idea worth working for, along with a clear understanding of what needs to be done.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“To The Manager, then, The Technician becomes a problem to be managed. To The Technician, The Manager becomes a meddler to be avoided. To both of them, The Entrepreneur is the one who got them into trouble in the first place!”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse,”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“There was absolutely no consistency to the experience.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“company is started differently than all the rest. A Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you. “And because it starts that way, it is more likely to continue that way. And therein resides the true difference between an Adolescent company, where everything is left up to chance, and a Mature company, where there is a vision against which the present is shaped. “But I’m getting ahead of myself,” I said. “The important”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The craftsperson develops a knowingness about the work she does that bears its own fruit, the fruit of being present, or attentive. The craftsperson learns that within the work she does there is a jewel hiding below the surface. That the thrill of the craft is to discover the jewel. And that there is only one way to discover it: to practice the craft mindlessly. To become one with the work. To polish and polish, as though with one’s heart. That there is no way to know when the jewel will show itself, but to trust with all one’s heart that one day, when it is least expected, the jewel will be there! It will appear. “And so the craftsperson is one who has reached that stage of her development where she is content with the work, and only the work, knowing that it is only through being there with one’s work that the jewel will reveal itself, and that it is the work, and only the work, raised to the level of near perfection that connects the craftsperson with herself, with her own heart. And so she practices, day in and day out, content to do so, without the thrill of the apprentice to keep her going, but knowing deep inside that there is no place to go but here.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Because, the moment you chose to start a small business, Sarah, you unwittingly chose to play a significantly larger game than any game you had ever played before.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“This book, then, is a product of the last fifteen years, as well as a product of the fifteen years that preceded them. It was almost exactly eight years before The E-Myth was published that I founded our company, E-Myth Worldwide, which has provided the fuel and experience for the point of view I have shared with those of you who have read The E-Myth, and with those”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“no one knew what was going on! It was completely open to interpretation. And his guess was as good as anyone’s. My God, probably even better.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“I once heard a story about Tom Watson, the founder of IBM. Asked to what he attributed the phenomenal success of IBM, he is said to have answered: IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one Now,”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Remember, Sarah, any plan is better than no plan. “Because in the process of defining the future, the plan begins to shape itself to reality, both the reality of the world out there and the reality you are able to create in here. “And as those two realities merge, they form a new reality—call it your reality, call it the unique invention that is uniquely yours, the reality of your mind and your heart uniting with all the elements of your business, and your business with the world, shaping, designing, collaborating, to form something that never existed before in exactly that way.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“And as the world becomes more and more complex, and the commodities more varied, the feelings we want become more urgent, less rational, more unconscious.”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one”
― Michael E. Gerber, quote from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

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