Genius is eternal patience.

May I suggest a simple way in which each one of us can exercise our faith and start our personal missionary service. Write down a date in the near future on which you will have someone ready to be taught the gospel. Do not worry that you do not have someone already in mind. Let the Lord help you as you pray diligently for guidance. Fast and pray, seeking guidance and direction from our Heavenly Father.

Many, if not all, of you will have special spiritual experiences as the Lord inspires you. I know from my own personal and family missionary experience that the Lord will enlighten your mind. He will sharpen your vision of this work by bringing names of nonmembers to your mind that you have never before regarded as potential members of the Church. As you continue, you will be blessed to know what you should say and how you should approach each person.

Brothers and sisters, you will notice that I did not suggest that you write down a name, but rather that you write down a specific date. The key to our success will be to ask for divine guidance that we might be directed to those who will accept the gospel.

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.

...if you learn to think straight, you can begin at any point where you are today and apply some of these basic principles to help in the mighty and heavy responsibilities of life. And if you are living righteously and worthily, in such a way that you can supplicate the Lord for direction, according to President Lee, you can expect to have divine inspiration and direction.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Going to the temple will give us perspective. I find it easy to get lost and derailed. I know that frequent temple attendance will give new thinking to old problems. Sometimes when we are there things look different because we see ourselves differently; no other place can give us such hope.

But how, you ask, do you get this glimpse of the future that helps you to hang on? Well, for me that is one of the great gifts of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not insignificant that early in this life Joseph Smith was taught this lesson three times in the same night and once again the next morning. Moroni said, quoting the Lord verbatim as recorded by the prophet Joel:

I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:

And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids of those days will I pour out my spirit. [Joel 2:28­29]

Dreaming dreams and seeing visions. The Lord's spirit upon all flesh--sons and daughters, old and young, servants and handmaidens. I may be wrong, but I can't imagine an Old Testament verse of any kind that could have helped this boy prophet more. He is being called into the battle of his life, for life itself, or at least for its real meaning and purpose. He will be driven and hunted and hounded. His enemies will rail and ridicule. He will see his children die and his land lost and his marriage tremble. He will languish in prison through a Missouri winter, and he will cry out toward the vault of heaven, "O God, where art thou? . . . How long. . . .O Lord, how long?" (D&C 121:1­3). Finally he would walk the streets of his own city uncertain who, except for a precious few, were really friend or actually foe. And all that toil and trouble, pain and perspiration would end maliciously at Carthage--when there simply were finally more foes than friends. Felled by balls fired from the door of the jail inside and one coming through the window from outside, he fell dead into the hands of his murderers--thirty-eight years of age.

If all this and so much more was to face the Prophet in such a troubled lifetime, and if he finally knew what fate awaited him in Carthage, as he surely did, why didn't he just quit somewhere along the way? Who needs it? Who needs the abuse and the persecution and the despair and death? It doesn't sound fun to me, so why not just zip shut the cover of your Triple Combination, hand in your Articles of Faith cards, and go home?

Why not? For the simple reason that he had dreamed dreams and seen visions. Through the blood and the toil and the tears and the sweat, he had seen the redemption of Israel. It was out there somewhere--dimly, distantly--but it was there. So he kept his shoulder to the wheel until God said his work was finished.

The bolder you are, I would argue, the more you have to explain yourself on an interpersonal basis. The stronger, the more distinct, the more visionary your arguments, the more you have to reveal yourself as an individual to make people comfortable with the process by which you've come up with these ideas.