Michael Gerber on Being a Writer

E-Myth Author Offers Advice on How to Succeed at the Writing Life

Mar 11, 2008

Michael Gerber reveals how he got his start as a writer and offers unique advice to today's business writers on growing their own freelance businesses.

Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth series and, most recently, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, internationally renowned speaker on entrepreneurship, and head of E-Myth Worldwide, a company designed to help entrepreneurs succeed in their businesses, recently talked to Suite101’s Business and Finance editor about the business of being a writer.

Suite101: Many of our readers and contributors practice what they preach, in that their day jobs and professional employment experience qualify them to write about their subjects. How did you make the leap from being an entrepreneur to writing about it?

Michael Gerber: I always wanted to write, long before I had any interest in business. I wasn’t interested in the practical – I was interested in literature and poetry. But nothing really came of that. The first book I wrote was The E-Myth, and it came about by accident. A stringer from a publishing company heard me give a seminar on the key frustrations in running a small business. He asked me if I wanted to write a book about it, and the publisher put together a contract. I wrote that book in 90 days!

The most problematic part of the process of writing, for me, is picking an idea, because the ideas come very easily. After that, the writing has got to happen fast – otherwise it just kills me. The writing happens amidst all the other things I am doing; I have created six new companies recently, and everything I do speaks to everything else I do. It’s all the outcome of my thought processes. To create ideas and results is the most joyful part of it for me.

Suite101: What advice might you give Suite101 readers and contributors with respect to developing their careers as freelance writers in their field?

Michael Gerber: In E-Myth terms, a writer is a technician. A technician doesn’t create a business, an entrepreneur does. A writer must develop the entrepreneurial ability to see more than simply what they’re writing about.

A company that writes for people who don’t know how to write came to the E-Myth program because they couldn’t see the size of the opportunity around them – they were so caught up in the process of writing. The CEO, a former writer, was finally able to see that there was more than just writing to do. He was able to look bigger, to find what he didn’t know existed, and to get a handle on that. To do that, he had to look within.

Suite101: For people who haven’t read the E-Myth series, could you encapsulate the main message that runs through your books?

Michael Gerber: The E-Myth refers to the Entrepreneurial Myth – that people are not entrepreneurs, they are technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure. They are so caught up in doing the work, that they lose sight of the actual business. The most extraordinary thing they can do is to study entrepreneurship – or the act of designing a business.