Michael E. Gerber – The Course: Beyond The E-Myth

From: Michael E. Gerber

The Simple Solution to Economic Growth

What I’ve experienced over the past 40 years, working with small businesses around the globe, is that there’s a simple solution to economic growth.

Yes, I know we’ve all been taught that economics is complicated. A very sophisticated study. The stuff of large multinational corporations. The stuff of governments. The stuff of degree’d academics. The stuff of advanced degrees, and organizations devoted to the conversations and the considerations which run through it. The stuff of politics, of studies, of White Papers, of Reports, of Scientific scented Papers, of large, heady institutional panels, and talking heads.
The stuff of the elite, not the hoi polloi. The stuff of the 1%, not of the 99%. Difficult to understand, even with a doctorate on the subject.

Thus, we’ve all been told that the key to economic success rested upon our ability to get a “higher education” so that we could “understand” the often arcane physics of economics.

As though there was a language we needed to learn, an economics language, and until we learned the language of economics, we couldn’t even begin to carry on a conversation about economics.

And that language, if we elected to learn it and speak it, would demand that we enrolled in the educational hierarchy devoted to install and instill within those of us traveling from our hoi polloi status among the little people, to rise academically so we could be accepted, finally, among those elite institutions where the real living was done.

And so, countless millions of our young ones, along with their moms and dads, took on a huge financial obligation (getting higher each year!) to finance that “higher education”, even when they weren’t certain what the purpose of that “higher education” was. . . (Remember, it was spoken in a foreign language!). . . other than to make a good living when they were done, that is.

And, with exactly the same belief in hand, our government loaned all those upwardly aspiringly mobile kids the high gross dollars needed to enter the higher realm to get it. To get their ticket into that special world.

And our wonderfully motivated government made the commitment to do this obviously most important of important things, even though our government hadn’t yet figured out how these kids were going to pay back the once they graduated from the higher institution, and then found themselves back on the same street they’d come from!

Meaning, where were the jobs going to come from?

And, even more important, what kind of jobs were they being prepared to do, upon leaving the “higher learning” institution which gave them their passport to freedom, their certificate of graduation?

Not only that, but no one – not the moms or the dads or the “higher education” institutions which gladly took the money these kids borrowed from Uncle Sam and then turned over to them—had any idea what work these kids were going to do when they graduated with their “higher education”.

Not a clue!

Or how each of them were going to secure a reasonable return on their educational investment?

(Actually, nobody has figured out the answer to that question it seems, as the debt accumulated by all those kids, graduating from our colleges and universities, has now risen to a staggering $1.4 trillion, and growing! A monstrous economic bubble, bigger even than the devastating housing bubble of 2008! Look out for when it bursts!).

Talk about a bubble!

Talk about an economic catastrophe!

Even a dumb plumber would know such a bubble when he sees one.

Unfortunately, and evidently, not a soul among these smart and getting smarter “higher education” folks now surrounding us, the great steaming throng of them, a great and growing bubble of their own, the greater and greater percentage of whom are now on the dole – on government subsistence — from the very same government that financed their “higher education,” not one of them seem to have a clue about what hit them and why it hit them, and where they’re supposed to go, and how they’re supposed to get there.

Seems like all their highly paid professors have left them out here alone, in the cold, with only their politics to keep them warm, and the senators and congressman, and Presidents, and Supreme Court Justices, and their Governors, and whomever, all those who assaulted the chambers of whatever institution they were accountable for, because not one of them ever asked the earnest and honest question, so what’ this “higher education” thing we’re investing in – this all too Public Education – supposed to produce, what are all these kids supposed to DO with it?

Become a politician?

Become a professor?

Become an attorney?

Become an agitator?

March down the streets of Washington D.C. for justice!

Become a cog in the wheel of this all too socialized monstrosity we’ve somehow elected to build?

This hobgoblin, this gobbledygook, this monstrosity without wheels?

And then there’s the real world, the world in which the makers make and the doers do and the creators create. . . .

On the other hand, in my experience with the tens upon tens of thousands of small companies we’ve worked with over the years, economics is not sophisticated, is not complex, is not difficult at all to get a handle on.

Indeed, over the past 40 years of my small business development career, I’ve watched tens of thousands of folks seemingly at the bottom of the economic and educational barrel-called-ladder, produce stunning economic outcomes, with little more than a grade school or high school education to serve them.

“Grade school, high school.” Get it?

Guys like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, for example.

Guys like plumbers and electricians and mechanics and landscape contractors.

Guys like graphic designers, and hair designers, and personal trainers, and carpenters.

Software guys, and hardware guys, agile guys and driven guys, ladies and gentleman who were driven by a different muse, a different schedule from all of their higher seeking peers.

In short, it wasn’t their education that provided them with their economic smarts;

. . . it was their vigorous curiosity and passion for making it on their own.

There was something remarkably stimulating about their drive to succeed, those guys and ladies I met, their determination to make something happen, to climb a ladder of their own individual economic possibility, and to then go higher than even that.

In sum, economics, I discovered, watching all these small business folks do their thing, is nothing more than a balance sheet showing the plusses and minuses produced by their continuous grass roots effort.

Anyone with a simple calculator or the ten fingers on their two hands could add it up.

It came down to nothing more or less than, did I do it or didn’t I?

And if I did, why did I?

And if I didn’t, why not?

And if it worked, how so?

And if it didn’t work, why didn’t it? What was missing in this picture?

And the answers as to why yes and why no were as clear as the metaphorical bell.

Any dummy could figure it out.

Allow Me to Share their Secret with You

Economics, the way it works on the street, is simply a matter of choice and action.

The choice to make it on your own, to excel at it, and the action to make that happen.

In a business, I discovered, the first choice is who am I here to serve?

Meaning, who’s my customer?

The smartest of the smart guys on the street, I noticed, didn’t start with what am I going to sell?

They started with, if I had it, whatever “it” needed to be, who am I going to sell it to?

Economics, therefore, was about motivations, perceived needs, real needs, and consequences.

In short, about the customer.

The customer was and is the driving force behind economics.

Not the business, but the customer.

How customers thought, felt, lived, did without, made do, survived, made decisions, managed their affairs, all of these were the subject of most concern to what I’ve come to call, “street economics.”

Without understanding needs and wants, no economy could thrive.

Which was both the aggregate of those very same needs and wants, and the aggregator of them.

Meaning, since businesses were the product of the very same people’s needs and wants we call customers, only differently expressed, in order to be successful at fulfilling one’s needs and wants to make it on one’s own, one’s own needs and wants needed to be understood even more clearly, lest the long term expenditure of time and money and emotional and mental energy to make it on your own – to start your own small business — would be wasted on a failed effort.

Needs and wants.

The glue which holds every economy together.

Or pulls it apart.

This was loud and clear to me as I worked my way through the small business jungle I encountered way back then, starting out in 1975, when I was preparing to get educated as to the startlingly vibrant world in which the economy did its thing.

Educated on the street where the real action was, not in a school where it wasn’t!

It became clear to me that the business guys who became experts at satisfying needs and wants, were the stars of that universe, that jungle, and those who didn’t, failed.

What the stars learned, I learned.

What the “also-rans” learned, I put in my books, and in my programs.

It became obvious to me what my work was to be, starting out back then at the mid-life of my life, at the age of 41.

I was to transform the “also-rans” into stars.

And I had to figure out a way to do it.

One more step into the jungle inhabited by “also-rans”.

But, it wasn’t just the needs and wants of the consumer the “also-rans” needed to know about to become “economic stars.”

It was about understanding the needs and wants within themselves which was essential if any progress was to be made.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the question — who am I? — became the driving question our new “also-ran” clients needed to entertain, but in earnest.

Our small business clients first needed to become introspective before they became ‘extro-spective’. They needed to look inside before they looked outside.

That’s where confidence is born.

That’s where the will to aspire is generated.

That’s where the imagination is stimulated to churn its delightful engine toward the seeming Unknown.

I say “seeming Unknown” because I grew to understand that the Unknown as we see it is actually right there inside of each and every one of us just waiting to be discovered.

The language is a language we already know.

Unlike the extreme language of economics, foreign to us all, the language of imagination is composed of pictures, and stories, and feelings and colors, and music, and desires and human stuff which radiates all about us and through us, in stuff we’ve seen, and stuff we’ve felt, and stuff we’ve thought, and experiences we’ve had.

It’s the stuff of poetry, and rap, and jazz, and harmonics, and love, and children, and husbands and wives, and moms and dads, and Beethoven, and Brahms, and Michelangelo, and Picasso, and sex, and tears, and laughter, and your great uncle, Dave.

And what else do you think making it on your own is all about?

Why nothing else, of course.

Other than to discover your very own path and then begin to forge forward on it, and to invent it every single step of the way.

It’s that which I made the commitment to bring to everyone.

The will and the wiles to forge one’s own way.

Welcome to “The Course™” and The Re-Invention of Your Life.