Michael J. Fanuele - Stop Making Sense: The Art of Inspiring Anybody

Advance Praise for
Stop Making Sense

Michael Fanuele has quantified the impossible. Stop Making Sense is a new manual for learning true leadership, a book about how to be the best version of yourself whether your arena is the boardroom, or the living room. INSPIRING others is all about selflessness, its about acting your way into right thinking, its about being the change in the world that you want to see by embracing compassion. If you are looking for contentment and unlocking your potential for success, however you define it, then Fanueles set of simple principles that changed my life over the last quarter century will change yours in a matter of hours. If Simon Sinek and Bren Brown had a book baby together, youre looking at it right now.

Andrew Zimmern , chef, author, teacher, host and producer
of Travel Channels Bizarre Foods

Michael Fanuele shows us how our passion and emotion will take us farther than our logic ever can. I can't convince you to read this book, but I guarantee you'll be inspired by doing so.

Beth Comstock , author of Imagine It Forward and former vice chair, GE

This is the book we need now: a blueprint for leading with heart, passion, and imagination. Fanuele is such a fun and generous storyteller you almost don't realize that hes murdering so many small and cynical voices.

Andrew Essex , Co-founder, Plan A; author of The End of Advertising ;
former CEO, Droga5 and Tribeca Enterprises

This funny, sweary, energetic, challenging book will push you into a whole new way to find that compelling inspiration wed all secretly like 1000% more of.

Adam Morgan , author of Eating The Big Fish , A Beautiful Constraint ,
and founder, eatbigfish

The best magic bends your brain, and thats exactly what Michael Fanuele does in Stop Making Sense . With wit and insight, he dismisses the myth that we have to wait for inspiration to strike. He reveals the secrets that can make any of us a muse, dazzling audiences and getting the very best out of our teams, families, and most important, ourselves.

David Kwong , magician, The Enigmatist, author of Spellbound ,
puzzle creator, and producer

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Stop Making Sense:

The Art of Inspiring Anybody

2019 by Michael J. Fanuele

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64293-229-4

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-230-0

Cover art and interior charts and worksheets by JOAN Creative

Author photo by Ollie Fanuele

Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

For my teachers, especially the one in the
wondrous shape of Joanna.

Put your thoughts to sleep.
Do not let them cast a shadow
over the moon of your heart.
Let go of thinking.

Rumi

Alice laughed. Theres no use trying, she said: one cant believe impossible things.

I daresay you havent had much practice, said the Queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes Ive believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll , Through the Looking-Glass

Contents

The hero is
one who kindles
a great light in the world,
who sets up blazing torches
in the dark streets of life.

Felix Adler

In the summer of 1977, in the winter of the Cold War, David Bowie was in West Berlin to record a new album. His band was working in a run-down studio less than half a mile from the Berlin Wall. It was an old ballroom where Nazis used to party.

One of the tracks on the album was supposed to be an instrumental. The band had the sound down: an experimental number with guitar feedback, a whirring synthesizer, and even a clanging ashtray.

Late one night, gazing out from the studios window, David Bowie spied something mysterious in the shadow of that nearby wall: a man and a woman kissing, just steps away from soldiers patrolling with rifles. Love and guns, close enough to touch.

Possessed by that image, Bowie would write the lyrics to Heroes in a matter of hours, and that instrumental track would get its words.

As the band recorded the new song, the producer had a strange idea: with each verse, he would pull the microphone farther away from Bowie, forcing him to sing louder and louder so that, by the end of the song, Bowie had to shout just to be heard.

There was David Bowie, in an old Nazi partyplace, shouting at that wall about love and guns.

It was one of the most emotional performances Ive ever done. I was in tears. Theyd backed up the stage to [the Berlin Wall] itself so that the wall was acting as our backdrop. We kind of heard that a few of the East Berliners might actually get a chance to hear the thing, but we didnt realize in what numbers they would. And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. Id never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again. When we did Heroes it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer.

David Bowie in 2003, recalling his 1987 performance at Platz der Republik in West Berlin, next to the wall that had divided the city for almost thirty years.

Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.

German Foreign Office , Twitter, January 11, 2016,
the day after David Bowie died.

D id a rock-and-roll song really help crumble the Berlin Wall?

David Bowies Heroes is not a patriotic anthem; no, its a strange six-minute song that starts with a man wishing his lover could swim like a dolphin. Like a dolphin. From there, the lyric goes on to share the scene of a clandestine kiss beside a wall, under a sky riddled with bullets. Its a beautiful, haunting image, but did this song really help change the course of history?

God, I hope so.

Beneath the geo-politics and macro-economics, beneath all the complicated factors that shift the real lives of people and yet seem so far out of their own control, is that thing called the human spirit. The human spiritthat force that has braved frontiers, on earth and in space, in technology and sport, that has birthed nations, industries, religions, and masterpieces, that has faced down tanks, tyrants, and the ugliest oppressionwell, surely, that magnificent force can chip away at a few stones.

And we knowwe know from our own highs and breakthroughs, from our own moments of mustering a strength we werent sure we hadthat nothing moves that human spirit like music does. It shifts our feelings, and then it changes our behavior. It starts with toe-tapping and shoulder-swaying and singing along, and it ends with you feeling understood or turned on or more powerful than you were mere moments before.

Music moves us, and it moves us.

Which is why the ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed that music, like a dangerous drug, should be regulated by the government. He loved its ability to bring order to the minds of children and rouse bravery in the hearts of warriors, but he worried that innovation in music might just incite society-spinning rebellion. And he was right, of course. Look at the history of civil protest in America: there were slaves singing spirituals on southern plantations; there were hippies and radicals marching to the strums of folk songs; and there were gay rights activists in New York City discos where dancing itself was an act of exuberant political defiance. This music wasnt just the soundtrack of these movements; it was their soul food. Plato was right to be worried about the awesome power of ABBA.