'Tell to Win' reveals the key elements that tellers of purposeful stories utilize to engage their listeners and turn them into viral advocates of the tellers' goals.
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.
Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other's micro-expressions.
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.
Use state-of-the-heart technology online and offline to turn listeners into viral advocates and customers into raving fans.
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.
Stories aren't the icing on the cake; they are the cake!
The idea is, we're still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.
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.
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.
Think about all the great leaders. Think about Obama. Think about Clinton. Think about Nelson Mandela. Think about all the people that we know who are very successful in business, in politics and religion. What are they? They tell purposeful stories. They move people to action by aiming at the heart.
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.
The reality is that every movie is a new business. Nobody says, 'Hey, let's go down to the Pantages Theater, I hear a Warner Brothers picture is playing there.' Or, 'Let's go to this theater, I hear the film came in on budget.' It'd be ridiculous.
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.
At Casablanca we did 'Midnight Express,' 'Flashdance,' and 'The Deep.' My willingness for risk has always been my strength.
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.
Every journey that is successful has culs-de-sac and speed bumps. I carry a wisdom gene through my life through the good, the bad, and the ugly.
When you want to move somebody, you have to say to yourself: 'I'm in the emotional transportation business. I gotta move them, emotionally.'
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.
