From Stop Making Sense:

         This book has one goal: to help you be as inspiring as you need to be to achieve whatever extraordinary thing you can imagine. So ask yourself: What do you want to do?

         Do you dream of quitting your job and pouring your passion into a business that feeds your soul’s hunger for meaningful work? Do you want to rise up the ranks of your company and lead it to industry-rattling success? Do you want to close the deal, win the account, and save the day? Do you want to move markets by moving customers? Do you want to be the kind of manager that gets the very best out of her team?

         Do you aspire to be the kind of parent that helps his kids navigate the tricky terrain of the modern world as they grow into being their very best selves? Of course you do, but you also know parenting is such hard, tricky work. Or maybe you are that kid and your dreams are the biggest in the world: the fame and fortune and good-doing that can only come from sharing your one-of-a-kind gifts.

         Do you want to win your weekend tennis match? Do you want to eat better, read more, or drink less? Do you want to rekindle a fading relationship?

         Maybe you need to move an actual army or a congregation or a classroom or a team.

         Heck, maybe you’re aiming to change the whole damn world?

         Each of us is a leader. Some of us have the official title, but each of us has the responsibility, the burden and privilege of leading people, of moving people. Yes, each of us is a leader.

         And as you’ll see, to lead, you’ll need to be inspiring, to arouse emotions – both your own and others – to the point of action. You simply can’t will or wish or reason or muscle your way there. No, you’ll need to tangle with the messy feelings of the very real people who stand between you and everything you desire. You’ll have to turn on those feelings and let those people loose. You’ll have to inspire.

         Now you might, like some old scientists, be thinking that “inspiration” is a gift from the gods, a natural skill, like perfect pitch or deft hand-eye coordination that some people are born with and others can never quite match. I’m no Kennedy, you’d say.

         And you’d be wrong. Inspiring is a learnable, practicable skill. Like singing or sports, not everybody will become great, but all of us can become good enough to get the job done. You see, the latest scientific understanding suggests we’re all born with the building-block capacity to inspire; it’s our ability to be emotional, to be passionate. If you can be excited, you can be inspiring. If you can feel Oprah, you can be Oprah. Well, almost Oprah.

As the great jazz musician Miles Davis put it, “Anybody can play. The note is only 20%. The attitude of the motherf*cker who plays it is 80%.”

        Attitude. You got that, right?

         There’s a catch, of course. To be inspiring, you’ll have to learn to do something else, something that won’t come so easily to your reasonable self: You’ll have to stop making so much sense. You’ll have to be slightly delusional and very vulnerable. You’ll have to speak strange words. You’ll have to be emotional in environments that frown upon feelings. You’ll have to shout and whisper and maybe occasionally use impolite language. You’ll have to imagine that you are in fact a force of nature sent by the gods to change the very nature of the world. And you’ll have to act like it. You’ll have to make yourself a Muse.

         But that’s it.

         It might even be fun.

         Are you ready?