Stories aren't the icing on the cake; they are the cake!
Peter GuberRead
Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.
Interpretation
Success is often accompanied by the potential for failure, and failures can lead to future successes.
Peter Guber's quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of success and failure, suggesting that they are two sides of the same coin. Every great achievement has its challenges and setbacks, and every failure contains the potential for learning and future success. The key takeaway is that one should embrace both experiences as part of the journey, understanding that they can lead to growth and improvement.
In practice
In a motivational speech about entrepreneurship, one might say this quote to encourage resilience during tough times.
Stories aren't the icing on the cake; they are the cake!
In any situation that calls for you to persuade, convince or manage someone or a group of people to do something, the ability to tell a purposeful story will be your secret sauce. Telling to win through purposeful stories is situation, industry, gender, demographic, and psychographic-agnostic. It's an all-purpose, everyone wins tool.
Today everyone, whether they know it or not, is in the emotional transportation business. More and more, success is won by creating compelling stories that have the power to move people to action. Simply put, if you canβt tell it, you canβt sell it.
The minute you start the process of deciding to make a film and you're communicating that vision to anyone, you're in the process of selling. If you don't understand that, you're not in show business. You're just not.
Telling purposeful stories is interactive. It's not a monolog. Ultimately, purposeful tellers must surrender control of their stories, creating a gap for the listener(s) to willingly cross in order to take ownership. Only when the listener(s) own the tellers' story and make it theirs, will they virally market it.
Miss the audience's heart as a filmmaker, and the only wallet that gets hit will be your own. That's because the heart is always the first target in story telling.
I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better.
I wanted to sell a million records, and I sold a million records. I wanted to go platinum; I went platinum. I've been working nonstop since I was 15. I don't even know how to chill out.
The success [of Mary Kay Inc.] is much, much deeper than just dollars and cents and buildings and assets. The real success of our Company is measured to me in the lives that have been touched and given hope.
Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.
Time is money, be a better you.
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.