The E Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber

This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It is good for people looking to start a business but probably more appropriate for people that have been in business for a year or two and now need some help. I believe this book is the answer to almost every problem.

In the big picture, the book is a solution to life problems. As Gerber quotes from Rollo May's Man's Search for Himself:

Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day...freedom is not just the matter of saying "Yes" or "No" to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche's phrase, "to become what we truly are".

And so it is that properly setting up a business is a path for freedom, not just from your business but from all aspects of your life, being in control of them, and adding value to them.

It requires using planning, testing methods, and creating innovations. Having fun in the world, and putting yourself to the challenge. Here are a few quotes I like from the book:

The entrepreneurial personality turns the most trivial condition into an exceptional opportunity. The Entrepreneur is the visionary in us. The dreamer. The energy behind every human activity. The imagination that sparks the fire of the future. The catalyst for change. The Entrepreneur lives in the future, never in the past, rarely in the present. He's happiest when left free to construct images of "what-if" and "if-when".

The managerial personality is pragmatic. Without The Manager there would be no planning, no order, no predictability...If the Entrepreneur lives in the future, The Manager lives in the past.

The Technician is the doer. "If you want it done right, do it yourself" is The Technician's credo. The Technician loves to tinker. Things are to be taken apart and put back together again. Things aren't supposed to be dreamed about, they're supposed to be done. If The Entrepreneur lives in the future and The Manager lives in the past, The Technician lives in the present. He loves the feel of things and the fact that things can get done. As long as The Technician is working, he is happy, but only on one thing at a time. He knows that two things can't get done simultaneously; only a fool would try. So he works steadily and is happiest when he is in control of the work flow.

What is value? How do we understand it? I would suggest that value is what people perceive it to be, and nothing more.

What is he really buying when he buys from you? The truth is, nobody's interested in the commodity. People buy feelings. And as the world becomes more varied, the feelings we want become more urgent, less rational, more unconscious. How your business anticipates those feelings and satisfies them is your product.

But when you live by your own rules, when you 'walk your talk,' when you live as you think, then your business will become a thing to behold.

So what could your Prototype do that would not only provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders but would provide it beyond their wildest expectations? That is the question every Entrepreneur must ask. Because it is the raison d'etre of his business!

...people have the unerring ability to forget everything they start and to be distracted by trivia.

In a television commercial, we’re told, the sale is made or lost in the first three or four seconds. In a print ad, tests have shown, 75 percent of the buying decisions are made at the headline alone. In a sales presentation, data have shown us, the sale is made or lost in the first three minutes.

Reality only exists in someone’s perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, conclusions – whatever you wish to call those positions of the mind from which all expectations arise – and nowhere else. So the famous dictum that says, “Find a need and fill it,” is inaccurate. It should say, “Find a perceived need and fill it.

Inquiry, the active solicitation of specific information, and controlled experimentation replaced the guessing, blind hope, and feverish busy work that preceded them. Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration became the driving forces behind their efforts.

“This marketing thing isn’t nearly as complicated as I might have made it seem,” I continued. “But it’s important that you take it seriously. Because it is most often is regarded by small business owners as merely ‘good common sense.’ And I have seen more often than not that the only definition of ‘good common sense’ is ‘my opinion.’ That most small business owners, suffering as they do from what I’ve come to call ‘willful disinformation,’ simply decide what they want to do without any information at all, without any interest in what’s true, and then simply do it. Stationery designed by the local quick –printer with a logo thrown in. Colors picked by their wives. Signs designed by the local sign guy whose experience is in painting signs, not in determining what colors and shapes are psychographically correct.”

Documentation provides your people with the structure they need and with a written account of how to "get the job done" in the most efficient and effective way. It communicates to the new employees, as well as to the old, that there is a logic to the world in which they have chosen to work, that there is a technology by which results are produced. Documentation is an affirmation of order.
Again from Toffler: "...for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized." *Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, P.389 (pg 104 in E-Myth)

“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. Worth-while standards against which our lives can be measured. Part of what’s missing is a Game Worth Playing.
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, 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.”



The curtain is your Comfort Zone. And your Comfort Zone has been the false mask you put on when you were a little girl, because it was safe when your spirit was not. Your Comfort Zone has been the tight little cozy planet on which you have lived, knowing all the places to hide because it's so small. Your Comfort Zone has seized you before, Sarah, and it can seize you again, when you're least prepared for it, because it knows what it means to you. Because it knows how much you want to be comfortable. Because it know what price you are willing to pay for the comfort of being in control. The ultimate price, your life...if this new path, if living with your spirit means anything to you at all, if you truly care about it, then guard it with your life. Because Comfort overtakes us all when we're least prepared for it. Comfort makes cowards of us all.

This book is a MUST READ if you are own a small business or are thinking of starting one.

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