Now, from the outside in, I can understand why you might be critical of McDonald’s. You might say that people shouldn’t eat meat. You might say that the hamburgers could be fatter, or less fatty, or this or that. But what you couldn’t say — what you could never say — is that McDonald’s doesn’t keep its promise. Because it does. Better than just about any business in the world, McDonald’s, the love of Ray Kroc’s life, still keeps its promise, long after Ray Kroc has gone. It delivers exactly what we have come to expect of it every single time.

The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life
takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.

Nada hubiera podido ser más acertado. Nada hubiera podido llegarme más hondo. Entonces, John Anderson dijo: «Vamos a dar una vuelta». Hay cuatro categorías de preferencia que toda empresa ha de satisfacer en la mente y en el corazón de las cuatro influencias fundamentales. • Preferencias visuales, preferencias emocionales, preferencias funcionales y preferencias económicas. Juntas, forman lo que llamo matriz de la empresa E-Myth. John Anderson lo sabía instintivamente.

And so that chapter of our hero’s life was closed and a new chapter opened. He moved into his early forties and the end of his second marriage, which also, by this time, had produced a child — his third daughter — another love of his life who could not, as no child can ever do, repair a broken marriage. During the years that followed, he became about the best anyone could be in his now chosen profession. He learned the secrets he thought were hidden. He married a woman far bigger than the others, had two more children, fought battles with his ignorance at times titanic in scope, moved through one obstacle after another, wrote books, spoke throughout the world, built a great business, only to watch it almost fail, persisted in building it up again, lanced, jabbed, wrestled, grappled, laughed, sang, loved, and roared, and through it all, remembered one simple thing that meant more to him than anything else he had ever thought: the curtain, the curtain. Keep the curtain up at all cost.