Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Gerber

Gerber’s line is a polite punch to the startup myth that a company is a monument to a single, glittering founder. It’s motivational on the surface, but the intent is corrective: stop waiting for genius to arrive, and start designing a business that can reliably produce excellence. The “ordinary people” phrasing isn’t self-help fluff so much as a management philosophy disguised as reassurance. If greatness can be assembled by regular humans, then the real scarce resource isn’t talent; it’s systems.

The subtext is slightly ruthless. By demystifying “extraordinary people,” Gerber shifts the burden from personality to process: hiring for heroics is a gamble; building repeatable ways of working is a strategy. It’s also a quiet critique of workplaces that celebrate fire-fighting and charismatic overwork. Extraordinary outcomes, in this view, come from ordinary disciplines done with uncommon consistency: clear roles, training that actually trains, checklists that get used, feedback loops that aren’t performative.

Context matters: Gerber’s whole brand (especially The E-Myth) is aimed at small-business owners trapped in a job they accidentally invented, confusing technical skill with business-building. The quote speaks to the late-20th-century managerial turn that prized scalability and standardization, but it lands cleanly in today’s economy too, where “founder worship” and “rockstar hires” still sell well. Its power is that it flatters without lying: you don’t have to be exceptional to build something exceptional, but you do have to change how you work.