“We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams.”

—Arthur O’Shaughnessy, “Ode”

You might be familiar with that quote from the movie when Willy Wonka grabs Veruca Salt by her snotty little face and reminds her that “pure imagination” can create almost anything, including lickable wallpaper on which snozzberries taste like actual snozzberries!

It’s permission to dream.

But what most of us don’t know is that Wonka is quoting from a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy that, just a few lines later, introduces another phrase, one that has become even more famous: “movers and shakers.” For O’Shaughnessy, music-makers and dreamers are not airy-fairy artists; no, they are the “movers and shakers of the world forever,” the ones who get the big work done.

Nobody is inspired to do small things.

Small, easy things, by their nature, don’t arouse emotions. They’re routine and unremarkable. Watching a wounded veteran, adjusting to life with prosthetic legs, pull herself across the occupational therapy room at a hospital is awe-inspiring. Watching any old you walk across that same room is not.

Therefore, if you seek to inspire, stretch your ambition—stretch it beyond reason, stretch your ambition as far as you can imagine, stretch it to the point of absurdity and delusion. Don’t beg your team to work the weekend. Tell them to save the company. Don’t tell your kid to finish her homework so she can watch YouTube. Tell her you believe she has it in her, through her hard work, to be the scientist that maps the hidden landscape of subatomic particles. Don’t tell yourself to lose five pounds before beach season begins. Imagine you’ll be the one turning every head on that shore, an audience of beach-combers admiring what you’ve done by dint of your awesome discipline.

And don’t worry about the mockery of small, cynical minds—or the whisper in your head that what you propose just might not be possible, that it might be crazy. Those objections are the evidence you’re onto something grand and world-tilting.

A reasonable ambition, a measured and measurable ambition, gets stuck in the tangle of that persnickety prefrontal cortex. A reasonable ambition is a duck sitting for an argument.

 

Dreaming is the first step to doing.
Dreaming big is the first step to doing big.

 

Muses must dream. Fantasy pulls you toward its own reality.

Delusion Confusion

When I was helping Heineken with their marketing strategy, the team decided we needed to know our “core consumer influencer,” inside and out. We called these people “The Social All Stars.” They were the movers and shakers amongst their friends, always one step ahead of their crew, knowing what clothes and clubs were cool. If we could understand them—their values and their preferences—we’d stand a better chance of connecting with them and influencing their friends, of helping Heineken become one of their favorite beers.

We did all the traditional market research. We held focus groups and commissioned surveys, but we were most excited by the “ethnographic” research we’d undertake. We would meet “The Social All Stars” on their terms, in their places, and we would study them until we understood them. So we went to bars and clubs and art galleries. We discussed music and fashion and graffiti.

One of my tasks was to head to Queens, New York, for a conversation with a music producer at his studio. I took the subway, followed the directions, and ended up at what was clearly not a professional music studio, but an apartment. I knew it was somebody’s home, because this Social All Star’s mom let me in and pointed me toward her son’s bedroom. This wasn’t right. I was supposed to be meeting a music producer of legal drinking age—and, here I was, face-to-face with a kid I would’ve sworn was a teenager who was spinning records on a deck in his bedroom.

 

“You’ve got to get delusional, man.”

 

I have no idea how this kid made it past the professional screeners we hired to organize our market research, but the jig was up. I asked him if he was, in fact, of legal drinking age. No. I asked him if he was, in fact, a music producer. Yes, well, sort of. I probed. Did he work with musicians? Did he make any records? Did he sell any albums?

I’ll never forget his reply: “If I don’t believe I’m making music, I’ll never be making music. If I don’t think I’m a music producer, I’ll never be a music producer. You’ve got to get delusional, man.”

We all know that Muhammad Ali said, “I am the greatest.” He said it and sang it again and again. But, years after, he had proven his boast, he copped to a confession, “…I said that even before I knew I was.”

Even Ali. Especially Ali. You’ve got to get delusional, man.

Delusion is a force that inspires. In fact, a Delusional Ambition is the embodiment of the Inspiration Equation: it’s an unreasonable expression of passion, an irrational proclamation of what you want you or your team to accomplish. It’s crazy. It’s mind-blowing. And that insanity is exactly its power. The dictionary’s definition of “delusion” is instructive:

An idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument (emphasis added)2

Delusion—as a clinical pathology—is a scary affliction. But delusion—as a tool to boost inspiration—is a treasure. It’s exciting. It is a belief that is “contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument”—which is precisely what you’re trying to do when you’re trying to inspire, to contradict rational argument. Breaking a two-hour marathon? Colonizing Mars? Getting into Harvard? Starting the most important company of the twenty-first century? Shedding a hundred pounds? That’s delusional, unreasonable, irrational, and, ultimately, wonderful stuff.