100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

Lead With Enthusiasm

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“Really? I didn’t realize that.”
“That’s the point.”
“What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.
“You aren’t realizing your lack of enthusiasm in front
of your team because you are choosing not to be conscious
of it.”
“How is it a choice?”
“You are choosing to be less than enthusiastic.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like I’m making
any kind of choice.” Jeremy said.
“You speak Spanish, don’t you Jeremy?”
“Yes, I do. I’m bilingual. It helps with certain customers.”
“Did you realize that you gave your talk to your team
in English? Were you aware of that?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Did you choose that?”
“Of course I chose it! The team all speaks English.
What are you driving at here?” Jeremy asked.
“Your choice to speak in English was as clear and defi-
nite a choice as your choice to be unenthusiastic. You have
an equally clear choice about enthusiasm (or no enthusiasm)
as you do about choosing between English and Spanish.
We recommend you stop choosing to be unenthusiastic
with your people.”
Jeremy said nothing.
“Because being calm and professional doesn’t moti-
vate. A chilly demeanor doesn’t make much of an impres-
sion. It is immediately forgotten, along with the idea you
are promoting.”
Enthusiasm comes from the Greek words 
en theos
,
which translate to “the God within,” the most spirited and

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spiritual you. You times 10. Like the you when you were a
little kid riding your bike with no hands.
Enthusiasm is contagious. If you are excited about your
idea, everyone else will be excited. That’s how it works.
Always remember Emerson’s observation, “Nothing great
was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
You can lead with enthusiasm, or you can lead without
enthusiasm. Those are your choices. One choice leads to a
highly motivated team; the other leads to long-term problems.
“But how can I be enthusiastic when I’m not?” Jeremy
finally said.
We have managers ask that question all the time. The
answer is easy. The way to 
be
enthusiastic is to 
act
enthu-
siastic. There isn’t a person in the world who can tell the
difference if you put your heart and soul into your acting.
And about a minute and a half into your acting, the funni-
est thing starts to happen: the enthusiasm becomes real.
You do feel it. And so does your team.
54. Encourage Your People
to Concentrate
The first law of success is concentration, to bend all the
energies to one point, and to go directly to that point,
looking neither to the right, nor to the left.
—William Matthews, Journalist
The other principle that Professor Mercado believed
in was concentration, or focus. And to drive it home to his
students, he had a bizarre system.
Encourage Your People to Concentrate

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
Scott recalls: Professor Mercado had us play music
recitals, as most teachers do. But at these recitals, he would
have us play our pieces twice. The first time we would play
them like at any standard recital. We would all play “Mary
Had A Little Lamb” on the violin and the audience would
politely clap. And then, after that performance was done
and everybody had a chance to play the traditional way,
Mercado would say, “Okay, now we’re going to play it
again. Everyone’s going to have a chance to perform their
piece again.”
But this time, while the performers were performing,
Mercado would pass out slips of paper to the audience.
The slips would have instructions written on them, such
as, “Go up to the performer and tickle his ear.” “Sing ‘Yan-
kee Doodle Dandy.’” Mercado would even say to the
performer’s accompanist, “Speed up.” “Slow down.”
“Stop.”
Mercado would then physically come up to us while
we were playing and he would do things even more radical
than that! He would take our bow away. He would untune
our strings so you couldn’t get any sound out of the string.
Then, he would start tuning the instrument back up. Ba-
sically, all hell would break loose during these second
performances.
And when it was over, he would ask each one of us,
“Which performance was better? The first, normal one,
or the second one, where all hell was breaking loose?”
When I ask people nowadays what they think the an-
swer was, most people guess it was the first, normal way.
But invariably, the second performance was better. The
one in which we were most distracted! And we all admit-
ted that. And then he would ask us the question, “Why?”

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And the answer was pretty obvious to the musicians
who had lived through it, and that was because we were
“forced” to totally concentrate and focus on our music
internally. We had been compelled to exclude every other
environmental impact or influence and just wipe it out. If
we had paid any attention to what was going on around us,
we would have become hopelessly lost.
And so by that total internal focus on what we were
attempting to produce—the music—and excluding every-
thing else, including our accompanist, we performed fan-
tastically in the face of extraordinary odds. You can’t
imagine anything that difficult.
The lesson was huge. And I use the lesson this way:
the next time I’m upset by the chaos and problems swirl-
ing all around me, I 
use it
to focus myself even more.
If you want your people to be truly inspired by your
example, show them how to use distractions to focus them
even more, not less. Show them how it’s done.
The great Igor Stravinsky once said, “My freedom will
be so much the greater and more meaningful the more
narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I sur-
round myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes con-
straint diminishes strength. The more constraints one
imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that
shackle the spirit.”
55. Inspire Inner Stability