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Aging & Wisdom Quote by Michael Gerber

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

About this Quote

Gerber’s line is a velvet-gloved rebuke to the romantic myth of the scrappy founder “living the dream” while silently building a new job with worse hours. The intent is corrective: to redefine “opportunity” away from a lucky opening in the market and toward a deliberate act of design. In his world, the entrepreneur isn’t the hero of hustle culture; they’re the architect of a system.

The wording does a lot of quiet work. “True” functions like a gate: plenty of ventures will make money, but they don’t qualify unless they expand the person running them. The phrase “invents” is the tell. Opportunity isn’t discovered like buried treasure; it’s constructed, almost engineered, through choices about process, delegation, and repeatability. That’s classic Gerber, whose broader message in The E-Myth is that most small business owners are technicians with ownership papers, mistaking competence in the craft for competence in building a company.

The subtext is a warning about identity: if the business can’t run without you, it owns you. “To work on” isn’t motivational poster language here; it’s a structural demand. It asks you to step out of the daily fires and treat the business as a product in itself, with you as its first stakeholder. Contextually, it lands as a critique of an economy that sells entrepreneurship as freedom while rewarding operational dependency. Gerber offers a harsher, more liberating premise: the point isn’t to be needed. It’s to become bigger than the job you created.

Quote Details

TopicEntrepreneur
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Gerber, Michael. (2026, February 5). A true business opportunity is the that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-true-business-opportunity-is-the-that-an-184950/

Chicago Style
Gerber, Michael. "A true business opportunity is the that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on." FixQuotes. February 5, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-true-business-opportunity-is-the-that-an-184950/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"A true business opportunity is the that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on." FixQuotes, 5 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-true-business-opportunity-is-the-that-an-184950/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Michael Gerber

Michael Gerber (born June 20, 1936) is a Author from USA.

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