Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Gerber

Gerber’s line lands like a slapstick gut-punch: you thought you were the boss, but the “boss” is a manic voice in your own head that never clocks out. The humor (“working for a lunatic”) isn’t just garnish; it’s the rhetorical trick that makes a harsh diagnosis feel undeniable. By turning the entrepreneur into an employee, Gerber flips the cultural script that treats self-employment as automatic freedom. He’s not attacking work ethic; he’s attacking the fantasy that hustle equals ownership.

The intent is practical and slightly prosecutorial: separate the person from the process. If the enterprise collapses when you step away, you haven’t built an asset, you’ve built a dependency. The subtext is a critique of small-business martyrdom, the kind that gets applauded as “passion” while functioning as a quiet form of self-exploitation. Calling the owner a “lunatic” is really about the irrational expectations baked into founder identity: be visionary, be operator, be customer support, be payroll, be growth engine. Sleep is optional; control is mandatory.

Contextually, this is classic E-Myth thinking from a writer who made a career out of demystifying entrepreneurship. It speaks to the technician-turned-founder problem: people start businesses because they’re good at a craft, then get trapped inside the craft, unable to design systems, delegate, or document. The line works because it punctures vanity. It replaces motivational poster entrepreneurship with an unromantic question: can this run without you, or are you just wearing a CEO costume while doing shift work 24/7?