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Author: [[Michael E. Gerber]] Full Title: E-Myth Mastery Category: #books FOREWORD “The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments…. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.” From The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel can’t take credit for any of it. I don’t have the ability to light my own fire. No matter how many times I’ve tried, no matter how much I have attempted to manipulate my feelings, nothing, no motivation or inspiration, no cosmological or earthly razzmatazz has had any impact on my being. For me, success, forward movement, improvement has been about being open to enough or available to receive a sufficient number of the blessings or miracles that have naturally come my way. That’s when the fire returns. And then it’s my job. I need to act. After the blessing, after the fire, I need to act. If I start moving before I start dreaming, which is what I call thinking without a clear, identifiable purpose, I lose it, more often than not. The blessing produces the fire which produces the impetus for the action, first in my mind, as an amorphous idea, then as an idea that takes shape as I express it, share about it, write about it, and ultimately make it happen. And when the thing that I’m doing meets the world as it is, and that meeting makes sense to both me and the world, there is an organic, sympathetic connection made that moves everything around me forward. That’s when what I’m doing takes on an even bigger, more purposeful form that no one could have anticipated at the outset. That’s Magic. I just love when that happens! When I’m available to blessings and the fire they ignite, Life is Magic. That’s how ordinary a guy I really am. I am impressed by the seemingly ordinary things that surround us. I can’t help myself. The bones of your spiritual body will one day be used to conduct experiments to discover what it was about you that led you to close the closet door of your life, from the inside, and then drive 16 penny nails through the door into the door frame to keep your spirit locked away forever. What came to me at that moment was that McDonald’s was far more than just a hamburger stand and far more than just a business. What came to me was that McDonald’s was a metaphor for the world. That the world—any world—could be organized into any damn thing I could imagine wanting it to be. When that happened, by what appeared to be simply an accident of need, I was ready. The Spirit called and it connected with the spirit in me. There is a logic to the Universe, the Spirit said. And all you’ve got to do is see it. Ray Kroc’s genius was his ability to see the simple in the complex. To turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, to produce incredible results with the blessing he was given when, at the age of 52, as a malted milk machine salesman, he walked into McDonald’s to sell the McDonald brothers a multi-mixer malted milk machine. The genius of Ray Kroc is that he lived his life like a little boy. Little boys play. Ray Kroc played. Little boys are moved by the most ordinary things. Ray Kroc was moved by ordinary things. Little boys get lost in dreaming all the time, only to find themselves in strange places.

AI Summary

E-Myth Mastery by Michael E. Gerber presents wisdom from the contemplative traditions.

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