“...You would begin to say to yourself, ‘It’s time for me to create a new life. It’s time for me to challenge my imagination and to begin the process of shaping an entirely new life. And the best way to do that anywhere in this whole wide opportunity-filled world is to create an exciting new business. One that can give me everything that I want, one that doesn’t require me to be there all the time, one that has the potential to be stunningly unique, one that people will talk about long after having shopped in it the very first time, and, as a result of that delightful experience, will come back to shop there again beause it has such a special flavor to it. I wonder what that business would be?’

“I wonder what that business would be?” I said to Sarah, “is the truly entrepreneurial question. The dreaming question, I call it. It’s the question that is at the heart of the work of an Entrepreneur. I wonder. I wonder. I wonder.

“So the work of an Entrepreneur is to wonder,” I continued. “To imagine and to dream. To see with as much of herself as she can muster the possibilities that waft about in midair someplace there above her head and within her heart. Not in the past but in the future. That’s the work the entrepreneurial personality does at the outset of her business and at each and every stage along the way. I wonder. I wonder. I wonder. Just as every inventor must. Just as every composer must. Just as every artist, or every craftsperson, or every physicist must. Just as every baker of pies must. I call it Future Work. ‘I wonder’ is the true work of the entrepreneurial personality.”

She tried to repress it, but I saw a small smile begin to form on Sarah’s mouth.

“How could I do this differently,” she finally asked me with growing confidence. “If I were to give the true entrepreneur in myself life, how could I totally change my experience of this business?”

“Now you’ve got it!” I said. “That’s just the right question. And to get to the answer…”

—Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited