Working On It

By

Michael E. Gerber

Just back from a rather hectic trip, to Mexico City, to Los Angeles, to Salt Lake City, to Washington D.C., to speak to hundreds and even thousands of individuals working in their businesses, working in their lives, hoping, all of them, for something much better, feeling, a great many of them, that they’re not doing too well.

And how about you?  Are you doing well?  Is your company making its mark on the people it needs to?  Is your company growing quickly, smartly, energetically, the way we would all wish our company would do?

Or has The Economy gotten you down?

Do I dare ask that question?  Do I?  Do I dare address the real issues most small businesses are dealing with these days?  Like perhaps you?  In the U.S. of A?  In Europe?  In Asia?  In Africa?  In the Middle East?  In South America?  In Canada?  On every continent, Island, Archipelago, et al?

Well, let’s look at it more deeply, from the standpoint that I bring to you in this column, that working ON it, as opposed to working IN it, can give you something that the Economic downturn cannot, thank God, turn down or away.

It’s so important this idea, this energy, this passion of mine.  I’ve put it to work in every place mentioned above, to see, without fail, that the creative mind, the innovative spirit, stands downturns on their head.  It, this spirit, creates always a new picture, it creates a new world.  It creates new questions, and following on their heels, new answers in new words almost never ever spoken before.  Or if spoken, never heard.

There is something astonishing about the people I meet, once they hear what it is I am saying to them.  That they possess a weight, a gravitas, a soul, beyond anything they’ve ever thought about themselves before.  I just met some of that in each of the places I visited above.  Street People, Academicians, Government People, shakers and bakers and toilet bowl makers.  All of them, in some way, needing to discover what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, what it means to be an entrepreneur, a creator, a solitary visitor here on this planet earth.

And every time I do that, go somewhere, see someone, speak to those who have come to experience something new, I walk away humbled, by the gift they have given me, by the surprises on their faces, by the wonder in their eyes at how different their lives are than they thought them to be.

As they and I experience together the infinite range of options available to us.

Every day.  Every time.  Every where, and every way.

Thanks for listening.

We’ll do this again.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Be Well.

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