Gerber Quotes

A pool just isn't the same as the ocean. It has no energy. No life.

Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is living fully and just existing.

A true business opportunity is the on that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on.

Delegating your accountabilities is abdication

Para olvidar a alguien hay que volverse extremadamente metódico. El desamor es una especie de enfermedad que solamente puede combatirse con rutina.

Never use limitations as an excuse for mediocrity.

With no clear picture of how you wish your life to be, how on earth are you going to live it? What is your Primary Aim? Where is the script to make your dreams come true? what is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?

Most salespeople think that selling is “closing.” It isn’t. Selling is opening.

Spies and parents never sleep.

Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.

Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.

If a kitten without a collar walks into your life, you have to keep him. Timing is everything.

Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created.

The true start-up of a business is what happens before you start-up.

the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.

Do I like living with Daniel's family? No. Would I ever tell him that? No. I know I'm all about honesty and saying what I think, but sometimes people are more important than the truth.

To The Manager, then, The Technician becomes a problem to be managed. To The Technician, The Manager becomes a meddler to be avoided. To both of them, The Entrepreneur is the one who got them into trouble in the first place!

We all need someone who understands.” - Magda Gerber

Just because I’d spent the last five years of my life dealing with diapers and dirty dishes didn’t mean my brain had turned into Gerber Oatmeal & Banana Cereal.

You know, I have to tell you"--I tried to make my voice bright to lighten the moo--"this ring of yours has got to be the ugliest thing I have ever seen." "I'm insulted." He held his hand up to the moonlight and straightened the monstrosity on his finger. "My dad gave this to me when we moved to Michigan.'To remember the old life' he said. I've never taken it off. I look at it and see California." "Remind me never to visit California.

The work we do is a reflection of who we are. If we’re sloppy at it, it’s because we’re sloppy inside. If we’re late at it, it’s because we’re late inside. If we’re bored by it, it’s because we’re bored inside, with ourselves, not with the work. The most menial work can be a piece of art when done by an artist. So the job here is not outside of ourselves, but inside of ourselves. How we do our work becomes a mirror of how we are inside.

You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it. Carlos Castaneda

Most people today are not getting what they want. Not from their jobs, not from their families, not from their religion, not from their government, and, most important, not from themselves. Something is missing in most of our lives. Part of what’s missing is purpose. Values. Worthwhile standards against which our lives can be measured. Part of what’s missing is a Game Worth Playing.

Life is about choices; it's not about excuses. Excuses only trap us into believing that we cannot take control of our own lives.

I guess change is pretty scary. Even if it's the good kind.

I guess when you don't have another choice, you have to make things happen for yourself, or they won't.

most businesses are operated according to what the owner wants as opposed to what the business needs.

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse,

All you need to do is begin living your life as if it were important. All you need to do is take your life seriously. To create it intentionally. To actively make your life into the life you wish it to be.

According to Richard Gerber, M.D.: “The ultimate approach to healing will be to remove the abnormalities at the subtle-energy level which led to the manifestation of illness in the first place.”2 Norm Shealy, M.D., founding president of the American Holistic Medical Association, has flatly stated that “energy medicine is the future of all medicine.”3 This emerging approach is actually both contemporary and ancient. According to Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel laureate in Medicine: “In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.

Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.

The system isn’t something you bring to the business. It’s something you derive from the process of building the business.

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are. Aldous Huxley

A business that looks orderly says to your customer that your people know what they’re doing.

And what makes people work is an idea worth working for, along with a clear understanding of what needs to be done.

William Gerbers” was a German-Swiss businessman living in Liverpool who had been conjured into being by Garbo before he even arrived in Britain.

Should continual economic growth be the predominant model, the highest purpose of human civilization? Continual growth is one characteristic of cancer that eventually destroys the host.

Fear, by its depressing effect on our mentality, thus causes disharmony in our physical and magnetic bodies and paves the way for [bacterial] invasion. The real cause of disease lies in our own personality. ..

He used you, yeah. But what if you hadn't come? My family would have run again, but we would never have been free. We would never stop hunting us." "I know." I thought of my frustration in Paris and I couldn't even imagine how sick of running Seth must be. "That's why I had to come." His eyebrow cocked upward. "And here I thought you came to see me.

Tolerance for failure is a very specific part of the excellent company culture—and that lesson comes directly from the top. Champions have to make lots of tries and consequently suffer some failures or the organization won’t learn. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. In Search of Excellence

Sauber gemacht wird erst, wenn einem der Dreck Tränen in die Augen treibt!

The key to becoming an entrepreneur is to be willing to start your business all over again.

Consciousness is the stone that creates the waves in a sea of nothing

What is standing in the way of my customer getting what he wants from my business?

Cuando un suceso es inexplicable se hace un hueco en alguna parte. Así que estamos llenos de agujeros, como un queso gruyer. Agujeros dentro de agujeros.

I think the best people, the ones who have reached the highest plateaus as human beings, are those who have known a great deal of adversity and have dealt with it and then moved ahead.

It is argued that if we try to save as many of the endangered fishes, bugs, and birds as possible, the economy will suffer. There is much evidence to show this would not be the case, but calibrating environmental protection to economic performance misses the point.

Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but that the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely necessary for you to do so.

So in the development of your Marketing Strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you forget about your dreams, forget about your visions, forget about your interests, forget about what you want—forget about everything but your customer!

Documentation is an affirmation of order.

seen from the appropriate perspective, the entire business process by which your company does what it does is a marketing process.

would approach me. Aunt Vera

Building a World Class Company is a commitment to the integration of passion, purpose, and practice.

Ouspensky was saying that hell on earth is life as we have always lived it, and heaven on earth is breaking free of our long-standing patterns.

There was absolutely no consistency to the experience.

A volte possediamo tutti gli elementi per conoscere la verità, solo che non vogliamo davvero saperla

The Franchise Prototype is also the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business.

So nice that you’ve bedazzled poor Tabitha into doing all your homework for you, Gerber, but it’s time for baby to wake up and face the music,

1. Your Primary Aim 2. Your Strategic Objective 3. Your Organizational Strategy 4. Your Management Strategy 5. Your People Strategy 6. Your Marketing Strategy 7. Your Systems Strategy

Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.

As the systems theorist Fritjof Capra points out, humanity's social, political, economic, and environmental plights are all manifestations of a cultural crisis brought about by adherence to outdated conceptual models ... Under the reductionist paradigm, humans' concept of nature devolved from that of living organism to machine, and the predominant value system came to be based on the domination and control of nature rather than respect for and harmony with the natural world.

Childhood is not a race to see how quickly a child can read, write and count. It is a small window of time to learn and develop at the pace that is right for each individual child. Earlier is not better

Dicen que cada respuesta a una pregunta es una nueva pregunta. Eso también es algo que nos une: ni los astrónomos, ni las buscadoras de desaparecidos, ni Hermano ni Yo sabemos nada. Todos estamos buscando huellas y haciéndonos preguntas. Todos estamos esperando que por fin aparezca eso que no podemos ver.

I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.

Henry Gerber, writing in 1932 under the pseudonym Parisex, responded to an article in The Modern Thinker that condemned homosexuality. "Is not the psychiatrist again putting the cart before the horse in saying that homosexuality is a symptom of the neurotic style of life?" he insisted. "Would it not sound more natural to say that the homosexual is made neurotic because his style of life is beset by thousands of dangers?

Because there is simply too much information to store in one's head, education must show how to go about learning -- not only how to find and use information, but also how to determine what is worthwhile to investigate in the first place, how to evaluate what one learns, and how to discover its connections to the whole.

Dok stojimo nad otvorenim grobovima uvijek nam u jurećim flešbekovima prođu sve naše protutnjale godine, a u pokisle, narančaste gerbere obećamo da ćemo od sutra drugačije, silovito, kurčevito, sa srcem i bez šteđenja, jer tko zna koliko još minuta imamo. Ideja nas drži do hladne kvake na kapiji groblja, jer ispred je opet onaj isti prevrtljivi, zli i kompromisni svijet, u kojem moramo pobjeći od sebe da bismo bili netko drugi.

It’s time for me to challenge my imagination and to begin the process of shaping an entirely new life. And the best way to do that anywhere in this whole wide opportunity-filled world is to create an exciting new business.

What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another. In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves? As a result, most of us scramble about hungrily seeking distraction, in music, in television, in people, in drugs. And most of all we seek things. Things to wear and things to do. Things to fill the emptiness. Things to shore up our eroding sense of self. Things to which we can attach meaning, significance, life. We’ve fast become a world of things. And most people are being buried in the profusion. What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. A place in which being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential. A place where the generally disorganized thinking that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result. A place where discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise and action, of being what you are intentionally instead of accidentally. A place that replaces the home most of us have lost. That’s what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.

Quality is just a word, and an empty word at that, if it doesn’t include harmony, balance, passion, intention, attention. “Continuous improvement for its own sake is a waste of time. “Life is what a business is about, and life is what this work is about. Coming to grips with oneself, in the face of an incredibly complex world that can teach us if we’re open to learn.

the business that was supposed to free him from the limitations of working for somebody else actually enslaves him. Suddenly the job he knew how to do so well becomes one job he knows how to do plus a dozen others he doesn’t know how to do at all.

It’s up to you to dictate your business’s rate of growth as best you can by understanding the key processes that need to be performed, the key objectives that need to be achieved, the key position you are aiming your business to hold in the marketplace.

If one were to list all the cruelties and maltreatments, both physical and emotional, that parents and adults inflict on children under the guise of love, the list would be a long one. But, going beyond such sinister examples, even kissing and hugging may or may not convey to a child that he is loved. Love is a feeling, an emotional state. Artists, writers, philosophers, poets have tried to define it. Marcel Proust says, "Love is space and time measured by the heart." What is space and time? It is the here and now. It is you. As unfortunately I am no poet, I will try to recall from my own experience how it feels to be truly loved by someone. It makes me feel good, it opens me up, it gives me strength, I feel less vulnerable, less lonely, less helpless, less confused, more honest, more rich; it fills me with hope, trust, creative energy and it refuels me. How do I perceive the other person who gives me these feelings? As honest, as one who sees and accepts me for what I really am, who objectively responds without being critical, whose authenticity and values I respect and who respects mine, who is available when needed, who listens and hears, who looks and sees me, who shares herself - who cares. Cares. To care is to put love in action. The way we care for our babies is then how they experience our love.

How can I systematize my business in such a way that it could be replicated 5,000 times, so the 5,000th unit would run as smoothly as the first? • How can I own my business, and still be free of it? • How can I spend my time doing the work I love to do rather than the work I have to do?

So when you ask, “Is this business an Opportunity Worth Pursuing?” the only way to tell is to determine how many selling opportunities you have (your customers’ demographics) and how successfully you can satisfy the emotional or perceived needs lurking there (your customers’ psychographics).

To be a great Technician is simply insufficient to the task of building a great small business. Being consumed by the tactical work of the business, as every Technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure is, leads to only one thing: a complicated, frustrating, and, eventually, demeaning job!

Ya no le dije que lo verdaderamente alucinante es que el pasado, al parecer, no desaparece, se queda ahí flotando en algún lugar y no deja de reconfigurarse. No es, necesariamente lo que está en nuestra memoria. Por lo tanto el tiempo tampoco es esa cosa lineal que todos pensamos; todo está hecho bolas.

Todas las cosas se descubren después. La soledad, por ejemplo. No cuando creemos que estamos solos ni cuando nos sentimos abandonados. Eso es otra cosa. La soledad es invisible, se atraviesa sin saberlo, sin darnos cuenta. Al menos esta de la que hablo. Es una especie de conjunto vacío que se instala en el cuerpo, en el habla, y nos vuelve ininteligibles. Aparece inesperadamente al mirar hacia atrás, instalada en un momento en el que no habíamos reparado.

Considering the timespan of human evolution and the vast potential of humankind -- as evidenced by great genius and leadership, inventions and discoveries, works of art and literature -- it is lamentable that the economic and political systems of 'advanced' cultures are still based on the unenlightened rationales that 'more is better' and 'might makes right.' In the name of 'survival of the fittest' and ensuring 'vital interests,' our economic system creates an ever-widening gap between rich and poor as it dismantles the environment upon which we all depend. Even 'lower' animals generally do not foul their own nests.

…for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized.”2 The operative word here is clear. Documentation provides the clarity structure needs if it is to be meaningful to your people.

Major Karl von Kronig,”’ he reads. ‘“Oberstleutnant Stefan Fenstermacher, Obergefreiter Lutz Gerber, Gefreiter Manfred Hahn, Gefreiter Reiner Brauer, Panzerfunker Gerhard Meister . . .” Bloody hell. No wonder they didn’t win the war with names like that. Take them a year and a half to do the roll call. What the hell’s “panzerfunker” when it’s at home?

An individual can make a difference, but a team makes a miracle.” Doug Pederson, Head Coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, after winning 2018 Super Bowl LII

And as the world becomes more and more complex, and the commodities more varied, the feelings we want become more urgent, less rational, more unconscious.

Your arrows do not carry,’ observed the Master, ‘because they do not reach far enough spiritually.’ Eugen Herrigel Zen and the Art of Archery

The game has to be real. You have to mean it. The game is a measure of you.

if living with your spirit, means anything to you at all, if you truly care about it, then guard it with your life. Because Comfort overtakes us all when we’re least prepared for it. Comfort makes cowards of us all.

Transposed to the social sphere, holism becomes apparent as a rebalancing of values and attitudes that have become distorted -- moving from aggressive to responsive, from predominantly masculine to a balance with the feminine, from competitive toward cooperative, from primarily rational toward intuitive, from analyzing toward synthesizing. These are not either/or dichotomies, as nature, an ever-present model for wholeness, reveals.

Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘to become what we truly are.’”1 And

Systems theory looks at the world in terms of the interrelatedness of all phenomena, and in this framework an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts is called a system. Fritjof Capra The Turning Point

Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed.

Drastic change creates an estrangement from the self, and generates a need for a new birth of a new identity. And it perhaps depends on the way this need is satisfied whether the process of change runs smoothly or is attended with convulsions and explosions. Eric Hoffer The Temper of Our Time E

The best you can do is treat them how you want them to treat you, stand up for yourself, and then don’t waste your energy worrying what they think. I know that’s especially hard right now when you can’t avoid them, but it’s good practice. There will be Tamars and Sages for the rest of your life.

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic! “And, besides, that’s not the purpose of going into business. “The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

Let me repeat once more that great quote by Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.” So before you start your business, or before you return to it tomorrow, ask yourself the following questions: • What do I wish my life to look like? • How do I wish my life to be on a day-to-day basis? • What would I like to be able to say I truly know in my life, about my life? • How would I like to be with other people in my life—my family, my friends, my business associates, my customers, my employees, my community? • How would I like people to think about me? • What would I like to be doing two years from now? Ten years from now? Twenty years from now? When my life comes to a close? • What specifically would I like to learn during my life—spiritually, physically, financially, technically, intellectually? About relationships? • How much money will I need to do the things I wish to do? By when will I need it? These are just a few of the questions you might ask yourself in the creation of your Primary Aim.

The Entrepreneurial Model What does The Entrepreneur see off in the distance that The Technician finds so difficult to see? What exactly is the Entrepreneurial Model? It’s a model of a business that fulfills the perceived needs of a specific segment of customers in an innovative way. The Entrepreneurial Model looks at a business as if it were a product, sitting on a shelf and competing for the customer’s attention against a whole shelf of competing products (or businesses). Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model, he surveys the world and asks: “Where is the opportunity?” Having identified it, he then goes back to the drawing board and constructs a solution to the frustrations he finds among a certain group of customers. A solution in the form of a business that looks and acts in a very specific way, the way the customer needs it to look and act, not The Entrepreneur. “How will my business look to the customer?” The Entrepreneur asks. “How will my business stand out from all the rest?” Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed. The Technician, on the other hand, looks inwardly, to

If you want to work in a business, get a job in somebody else’s business! But don’t go to work in your own. Because while you’re working, while you’re answering the telephone, while you’re baking pies, while you’re cleaning the windows and the floors, while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one

Because every extraordinary business knows that when you intentionally build your business around the skills of ordinary people, you will be forced to ask the difficult questions about how to produce a result without the extraordinary ones. You will be forced to find a system that leverages your ordinary people to the point where they can produce extraordinary results over and over again. You will be forced to invent innovative system solutions to the people problems that have plagued small businesses (and big businesses as well!) since the beginning of time. You will be forced to build a business that works. You will be forced to do the work of Business Development not as a replacement for people development but as its necessary correlate.