I recently attended a Dreaming Room, conducted by Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, and a long-time expert on small biz. I previously reported on a one-day seminar with Gerber. While the one-day is the appetizer, the two and a half-day workshop is the full meal. 

Being exposed to Michael Gerber’s ideas on life and work have been transformative. I think differently about my business. I have found my life purpose. And both of these have provided a new lens for viewing the world around me. It changes everything.

Having said that, Michael Gerber’s style is not for everyone. His message comes packaged in what I imagine is a Marine boot camp’s kinder moments—confrontational, provocative, and designed to wake you up. There is nothing subtle about Michael Gerber. Unless he purposely designed it that way. Having seen him in a 90-minute presentation, a one-day presentation, and over the course of a long weekend, he starts out in a “jumping up and down, waving both arms” demeanor to draw attention to his ideas and ends in a quiet, intimate, loving embrace of humanity.  I like him better when he’s settled in a bit.

So what did I learn from this brilliant man?

1. Successful businesses require the entrepreneur to be part Dreamer (right-brain), part Thinker (left-brain), part Story-Teller (right-brain), and part Leader (whole-brain.)  This fits in nicely with my passion for whole-brain thinking.

Gerber emphasizes that all businesses need to start with a Dreamer. The engineer in me wants to move right to the Thinker, before the Dreamer has finished. I have a hard-working Thinker. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how hard it works if it is working on the wrong thing. Gerber talks about the Thinker being the ally to the Dreamer, not the other way around. I tend to skip over the being/feeling to get to the doing/implementing. He says that most small businesses are started too soon, before the Dream has been fully expressed.

Why does this matter? Because a well-developed Dream, with exquisite clarity and deep feeling, provides the fuel for the entrepreneur’s journey.  Entrepreneurship—where a system is invented to transform a condition in the world– is not for wimps.

2. The Dreamer is unreasonable and irrational. The Dreamer pursues the impossible. It doesn’t iterate off of what I already have, to incrementally improve. It starts from a clean slate and looks at the question, “What condition in the world do I see that aches to be transformed?” I notice that while the dream is personal (it comes from my experiences), it is much larger than me. It serves the world.

The Dreamer demands that I let go of my identity today, the business I’ve built, to search for something so big, so juicy, so meaningful and engaging, that my life today will look small by comparison. It is both terrifying and thrilling.

3. While the Dreamer may sound like it deals in the nebulous, it is actually grounded in the concrete. Gerber talks about being an “pragmatic idealist.”  He harps on the idea of The Great Result. What is the Great Result of my Dream?  The Great Result could be that people in third world countries have drinkable water without having to walk five miles or that software products are designed with a woman’s viewpoint in mind or that the joy and dance of baroque music is experienced by an audience outside of the classical music world. It’s the “so what?” that makes the Dream so potent.

4. I asked Gerber the question, “What if you have lots of interests?”  He replied, “This is not about interests. This is about something so compelling, you would give your life to it.”  Oh. Yes, oh. That’s what he means by dreaming—something so big that in my terminology of Second Curves, there’s only one more second curve that will last me the rest of my life.

I recently hit upon what this last curve is for me. In the workshop, I could see the deep passion, the feeling that people have when they find their Dream. Yet, I had trouble feeling my Dream. Driving home from dropping the kids off from school, I felt my Dream, something that had never occurred to me before. It came to me with a few words. It brought me to tears. It thrilled me so much that I immediately called a friend who had also attended the Dreaming Room. She heard it in my voice and said, “That’s it. It’s palpable.”

What is my Dream?  That brings me to a piece of advice from Michael Gerber. He says, “Keep your dreams close to you.” That is, give them space to take off, before the spoilers, the cynics, and nay-sayers have their shot.

I’ll be ready to make my Dream public soon. And then, I’ll want your comments and experiences to help the Thinker in me figure out the implementation. I’ll announce a new blog to talk about my Dream next month. Stay tuned.