Gerber - E-myth mastery: [the seven essential disciplines for building a world class company]

If from now on you will treat everyone that you meet
like a holy person, you will be happy.

From The Holy Man by Susan Trott

Free yourself from all beliefs, all norms. See that you
live completely with beliefs. Free yourself from secondhand
information. See in you clearly what is beautiful.
All that is beautiful in you is right. Look at the situation
with an open mind, free from hearsay. The solution is in
the situation. So, see the situation clearly with an open
mind. Then the choiceless decision comes.

From Beyond Knowledge by Jean Klein

Just when I discovered the meaning of life,
it changed.

From Napalm & Sillyputty by George Carlin

The most amazing things have occurred in my life.

Things I could not have imagined until they happened.

That Im sitting here writing to you at this very moment, a book that youre holding, is amazing to me.

The story Im about to share with you in this book is also amazing to me. Its the story of a woman named Sarah, a baker of pies, a small-business owner, who became, after experiencing the kind of frustration and despair that comes when one discovers her business cannot fulfill the promise of joy and freedom she thought it would, a reluctant entrepreneur.

I call Sarah a reluctant entrepreneur because, even after all of our conversations, after all of the work we did together to transform her relationship with her business, Sarah still did not feel like an entrepreneur. She hadnt yet developed an intimate relationship with the entrepreneur in her, or the natural response that is expressed when that relationship is nurtured and alive and integrated. So at times, the entrepreneur in Sarah would flourish, and at times it would languish. What pulled her through every day was Sarahs intense desire to break free of the malaise that was confounding her in the operation of her business. She was determined to discover what she didnt know.

It is that intense desire, coupled with her childlike willingness to suspend disbelief, that makes Sarahs story amazing. I watched her grow, day by day, giving up her beliefs, one by one, attempting to do something new as soon as it was suggested to her, one step at a time, letting go, moving forward, and then backward, and then forward again, relentlessly pushing the envelope of her understanding, skill, and ability to see clearly. The progress she made was, and continues to be, amazing to me.

As Im sure your story is amazing.

As are the stories Ive heard of the thousands of small business owners who, despite their lack of knowledge and experience, despite how little they might have known about business, despite how much they thought they knew and then discovered they didnt, despite all of their dysfunctional habits and beliefs, despite all of that, have overcome monstrous obstacles that appeared insurmountable when they first showed up. Oh my God, now what? they would say, and then knuckle down, brace themselves, and let go of the huge No in their first response to discover the little Yes just behind it, which came from their heart, their determination, and their longing to overcome those obstacles. Each one of these stories is amazing.

Perhaps you havent thought about it that way, but as you read this book, Im certain you will come to find your story to be amazing. Just like Sarahs.

If you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you know Sarah. I shared our earlier meetings in that book, our process of discovery of what a business is and what a business isnt, and why her misconceptions so riddled her days with pain and constriction, only occasionally giving her the satisfaction she craved.

Everything Ive had the good fortune to give to Sarah has come from my experience, all of the stunning failures and successes that have made up my life. My story has, in some real way, shaped Sarahs story, just like specific people, at specific moments, have shaped mine. Id like to tell you about some of the ones who entered my life when I was a young man, searching for my calling.

All of my life, Ive been blessed by miraculous events that produce the kind of insights or epiphanies that change everything, forever. Randomly happenstance, seemingly disconnected, electrical zapping experiences that unalterably affect everything that followsZap Crackle Sparkand Im on a new path.

Like the time I was selling encyclopedias, and had been for a seemingly interminable length of time, and I had gone downtown to talk with an insurance executive who had been doggedly pursuing me to switch vocations, from the disreputable dead-end I was headed for, to the limitless respectable opportunity to become an insurance executive just like him.

Anyone who can sell encyclopedias as well as you can would be out of his mind not to sell insurance, he told me.

He was an elegant-looking man. Tall, Waspy, with perfectly coiffed white hair, a true executive type. Unlike the type of guys I had been working with in the book business.

Those guys could have been gangsters for all anyone knew. Black shirts, one-button sport jackets in bold checks, flashy, hip, quick to make a buck closers, or they wouldnt be around for very long.

And most werent around. Except me.

So, of course, the insurance executive was right.

I actually cant think of another guy who sold encyclopedias for as long as I did. There was a good reason for that, but I couldnt tell you what it was then. At 32 years old, I realize now, I had created my life so that nobody could or would tell me what to do. For all practical purposes, I became the Invisible Man. It was the 60s, in San Francisco, and I was an anomaly. With all the social insanity going on around me, with all the drugs and the music and the flowers, nobody gave a second thought to an encyclopedia salesman! Nobody cared what I did, not my boss or even my wife, until I sent in a contract. Thats when they remembered I was alive, and cheered me on, halfheartedly, to go out and get another one. It was enough to drive any reasonable man crazy. But, for all practical purposesand, of course, thats what I told myself I was doing it for, all practical purposesI was good at it, and I could always depend on closing enough deals to keep my life, and the lives of my loved ones, on an even, and sometimes respectably successful, financial keel. In short, knowing I could sell, that I could always come up with enough deals to satisfy the pragmatic reality of my life, gave me tremendous freedom. It meant that I could sit in my car and write poetry for all anyone cared. I could take a break for a night or two at a time to sit in at a jazz club just north of Fishermans Wharf at Pier 23, playing the saxophone with a jazz band that didnt care either if I showed up or not. But, given my passion and my sometimes raw and brilliant addition to their music, they tolerated me when I did. And, despite their lack of conviction, I played madly, hotly, full of love, the music busting free from my lonely heart like the wail of a lost man.

What I didnt realize at the time, with two kids and a wife who had her own way of sitting in, her own unexpressed passions, her own longing for something more true, was that the psychic exhaustion of our cacophonous life together had become unbearable, and that the prospect of making yet another cold call, on yet another unwary stranger, in the cold of the night, to engage them in my story about the fertile field of education awaiting themand the serious gap between where they were in their hopelessly uninformed life and where they could be with the 30 dense volumes of my magnificent Encyclopedia Americana at hand, not to mention all the other richly bound volumes that were to be theirs if they could only come to a decision, the 20 Books of Knowledge for the children they would certainly have one day, and the 10 Books of Art; but that wasnt all, for if they said yes tonight and signed the piece of paper, not only would they receive everything just mentioned, but in addition, on top of all the rest, they would be awarded, at absolutely no additional cost, the amazing, incomparable, 52-volume set of the red, faux-leather-bound Harvard Classics! all of this had become dreadful to me.