Stories aren't the icing on the cake; they are the cake!
Interpretation
Stories are fundamental and essential, not just an addition to something else.
In this quote, Peter Guber emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a core element of communication and experience. Rather than viewing stories as mere embellishments, he argues that they are the foundational substance that gives meaning and depth to our lives and interactions, much like the cake itself, as opposed to just being the decorative icing on top.
In practice
Using this quote at a workshop on storytelling techniques.
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.
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.
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
I start from one point and go as far as possible. But, unfortunately, I never lose my way. I 'localize,' which is to say that I think always in a given space. I rarely think of the whole of a solo, and only very briefly. I always return to the small part of the solo that I was in the process of playing.
The regrets in the theatre have always been the shows that you know ought to have worked but for one reason or another haven't.
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.
Give me a guitar and I'll play; give me a stage and I'll perform; give me an auditorium and I'll fill it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.