Do You Have The Guts?/Courtesy of Pixel Fixer via flickr
Back to Small Business Learning Center
By: Michael Gerber
Courtesy Of: E-Myth
22. Jul. 2008
It's important to understand that from my point of view, the entrepreneur is not a "person" but a part of everyone's personality. The entrepreneur is our visionary, the creator in each of us. We're born with that quality and it defines our lives as we respond to what we see, hear, feel, and experience. It is developed, nurtured, and given space to flourish or is squelched, thwarted, without air or stimulation, and dies. Look at anyone around you and you will recognize whether or not the entrepreneur is alive and well within them. The way they live their lives will demonstrate it.
The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities. Thus the entrepreneur must develop the necessary skills to choose the right opportunities to pursue. Few people understand that.
We're all born with the entrepreneurial spirit. The Old and the New Testament tell us "Man is born in the image of God." I believe this means that we are born to create. That is the role of the entrepreneur within us ... to create. Everyone is born with that drive, desire, passion, and interest.
Most business owners have not fully developed or nurtured the entrepreneur within themselves. Work, or what I call "doing it, doing it, doing it," consumes them. There is no time or energy to be creative, nor the understanding that being creative is being alive, fully alive. Few business owners are fully alive; they're too busy working for a living.
An entrepreneurial seizure is the moment the entrepreneur decides it would be a great idea to start his or her own business. It's when one believes that knowing how to do the work of a business is all one needs to understand in order to start and grow a business. So the accountant starts an accounting practice; the mechanic starts an auto repair business; the cook opens up a restaurant. They go to work, accounting, fixing cars, or cooking meals, none of which is the true work of the entrepreneur. In doing so, the person who starts his or her own business is lost in the teeming confusion created by demands he or she never anticipated...the demands of organization, the demands of cash flow, the demands of people — employees, customers, suppliers, banks, family — and so forth and so on. They are simply not prepared for the demands that are going to be made on them. The longer they're in business, the worse it gets. There is no vision; there is only being a slave to work and staying alive. The seizure is long gone...
What People Are Saying
Leave a Comment