Most men who reach their fifties can point to the companies they started, the buildings they remodeled, or the teams they led. What they cannot point to is the quiet ledger of who and what actually formed them before they began creating on their own. One morning, still in that half-awake state between dream and daylight, the gap announced itself plainly: formation runs from birth until the day you switch from being crafted to doing the crafting yourself. Everything before that switch had been left on an index card that never made it into the corpus.
Small business is personal. When 71 percent of businesses in the United States are one-person operations, the line between the work and the man doing it grows thin. The scotoma hides in that thin place. You do not see things the way they are; you see them the way you were formed to see them. Until the blind spot is named, the second half of life keeps repeating the patterns the first half ...