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.
There are two kinds of designers: ones who are very happy locked in their office surrounded by their coterie. The last thing they need to do is to go to a trunk show; they'd go running for the hills. I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it?
A star on a movie set is like a time bomb. That bomb has got to be defused so people can approach it without fear.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
I have the worst ear for criticism, even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle, who says she doesn't like blue.
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