Peter Guber Quotes

Use state-of-the-heart technology online and offline to turn listeners into viral advocates and customers into raving fans.

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 can't tell it, you can't sell it.

Without social cohesion, the human race wouldn't be here: We're not formidable enough to survive without the tactics, rules and strategies that allow people to work together.

I was born curious.

The seminal elements of what makes a story great - challenge, struggle, resolution - are the same whether we're talking about story content for a movie such as 'Rain Man,' or telling a purposeful story to forge new business relationships or conclude a fruitful transaction, such as acquiring an NBA franchise.

People love to be swept off their feet, to go into an environment where they've never been, to experience things they only dream about. And filmmaking offers that potential.

Social cohesion was built into language long before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter - we're tribal by nature. Tribes today aren't the same as tribes thousand of years ago: It isn't just religious tribes or ethnic tribes now: It's sports fans, it's communities, it's geography.

Well, the idea is that failure is an inevitable partner on the road to success and, if you're not willing to confront failure, you can never find out how good you are.

When you want to move somebody, you have to say to yourself: 'I'm in the emotional transportation business. I gotta move them, emotionally.'

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.

I've worked with Jack Warner and Jimmy Stewart - and Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp twice. I've had dinners with Fred Astaire and Cary Grant.

Welcome it as part of a process ... you just can't avoid it ... if you go to bat enough times, you are going to strike out; and you will do it cataclysmically; and you know success and failure are just millimeters apart.

Nothing drew me to the film business. I was propelled by the fear and anxiety of Vietnam. I had been drafted into the Marines. My brother was already serving in Vietnam. I bought, if you will, a stay of execution - both literally and figuratively - and went on to graduate school of business from the law school that I was attending.

When somebody is enthusiastic about a job opportunity - but gives off the feeling that this is not the only one they have on the table - they become more seductive in the employer's eyes. You become more desirable because it shows that you're making a conscious and thoughtful decision for the right reasons.

I never look in the rearview mirror.

Are you motivated? Are you coherent? Is your intention aligned? Are your feet, tongue, heart and wallet congruent? That intention shines through.

Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other's micro-expressions.

There are no rules, but you break them at your peril.

There's a sense of aliveness that comes from connection, shared experience. And you see it in every place. You see it when ball players jump up and down, gather at home plate, hugging, and it's not just because they're winning, it's that shared moment, that feeling of - we enter the world alone, we leave alone.

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.

Stories aren't the icing on the cake; they are the cake!

The portal into people's hearts is being interested in them.

The magic happens when you take facts and figures, features and benefits, decks and PowerPoints - relatively soulless information - and embed them in the telling of a purposeful story. Your 'tell' renders an experience to your audience, making the information inside the story memorable, resonant and actionable.

Most young people haven't used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game.

Tribalism isn't a bad thing. If you're a Facebook user, or Twitter user or Foursquare user or LinkedIn user, those are all tribes ... and they may even have sub-tribes. It's not pejorative, it's declarative.

I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.

The Internet is an audience of one, a million times over.

With a purposeful story, you can change a "wanna be" to a "gonna be" to a "be".

Stories are not lists, decks, Power-Points, flip charts, lectures, pleas, instructions, regulations, manifestos, calculations, lesson plans, threats, statistics, evidence, orders, or raw facts.

Good storytelling is harder than it sounds, but the easy part is that everyone has the ability to do it ... Tap into it.