The E-myth Revisited Quotes

“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.”
― Gerber Michael E., The E-myth Revisited

“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, The E-myth Revisited

“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, 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?”
― Gerber Michael E., The E-myth Revisited

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

“Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created.”
― Michael E. Gerber, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“most businesses are operated according to what the owner wants as opposed to what the business needs.”
― Michael E. Gerber, 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, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The system isn’t something you bring to the business. It’s something you derive from the process of building the business.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Quality is just a word, and an empty word at that, if it doesn’t include harmony, balance, passion, intention, attention. “Continuous improvement for its own sake is a waste of time. “Life is what a business is about, and life is what this work is about. Coming to grips with oneself, in the face of an incredibly complex world that can teach us if we’re open to learn.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but that the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely necessary for you to do so.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“A business that looks orderly says to your customer that your people know what they’re doing.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“All you need to do is begin living your life as if it were important. All you need to do is take your life seriously. To create it intentionally. To actively make your life into the life you wish it to be.”
― Michael E. Gerber, 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, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“What is standing in the way of my customer getting what he wants from my business?”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Documentation is an affirmation of order.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-myth Revisited

“the business that was supposed to free him from the limitations of working for somebody else actually enslaves him. Suddenly the job he knew how to do so well becomes one job he knows how to do plus a dozen others he doesn’t know how to do at all.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Let me repeat once more that great quote by 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.” So before you start your business, or before you return to it tomorrow, ask yourself the following questions: • What do I wish my life to look like? • How do I wish my life to be on a day-to-day basis? • What would I like to be able to say I truly know in my life, about my life? • How would I like to be with other people in my life—my family, my friends, my business associates, my customers, my employees, my community? • How would I like people to think about me? • What would I like to be doing two years from now? Ten years from now? Twenty years from now? When my life comes to a close? • What specifically would I like to learn during my life—spiritually, physically, financially, technically, intellectually? About relationships? • How much money will I need to do the things I wish to do? By when will I need it? These are just a few of the questions you might ask yourself in the creation of your Primary Aim.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It