Average leaders used the carrot and the stick to motivate those around them. Great leaders communicate a vision that captures the imagination and fires the hearts and minds of those around them. Average leaders inspire people to punch a time clock. Great leaders inspire industry and passion.

You can get people to work by using threats or by promising rewards. But if you want to create a band of brothers, you must inspire those who work with you and encourage them to give their all in a great cause.

Her palate for all the joys of sense and intellect and spirit was fresh and unspoiled. Nothing would have been wasted on her. She liked more things and liked them more than anyone I have known

Blogs are interesting because they are honest windows into other people's interests and passions. As it turns out, the world is full of fascinating, extremely smart people. The opportunity to learn what motivates, interests and excites them-- professionally or personally-- is invaluable. And often in a purely practical sense. I've found an answer to a Google query in a blog entry more than once.

What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love; stay in love, and it will decide everything.

I met Roland Henin on the beach in Narragansett. He was chef af a place called the Dunes Club, a big hotel; he commanded a kitchen the size of a football field with a crew of forty cooks, and he needed someone to cook staff meal.

The staff meal cook is low man in the kitchen hierarchy. You cook meals from scraps for people who work in the kitchen. But the Dunes Club was a high-end kitchen and Henin was a classical French chef, so our scraps might be the butt from a tenderloin, and with that I learned how to make beouf bourguignon. We'd have the legs left over from butchered chickens and with these I'd learned to make coq au vin. I turned lamb scraps into lamb navarin...

Staff meal was about the fundamentals of cooking and how to work with by-products, using scraps to make something tasty, eye-appealing, and satisfying. But the message underlying that was "Can you be passionate about cooking at this level?" Staff meal. Only the staff sees it. If you can make great food for these people, create that habit, have that drive, that sincerity, and keep that with you and take it to another level in the staff meal, then someday you'll be a great chef. Maybe.

Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness, the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.

Our headstrong passions shut the door of our souls against God.