TELL TO WIN BY PETER GUBER

The Book is about the strategic importance of appealing to people’s hearts in order to persuade others to support your vision, dream or cause, through story telling.

Non-‘stories’ may provide information, but stories have a unique power to move people’s hearts, minds, feet, and wallets, in the story teller’s intended direction.

For example, in film making, if you miss the audience’s hearts, the only wallet that gets hit will be your own. That is because the heart is always the first target in storytelling.

If one is pursuing a cause that will improve the life of others, for instance, providing clean water for kids in Somalia, and one tells a story of how kids in this area die from lack of clean water and such film is viewed by an audience of businessmen, it’s most likely going to appeal to their hearts, and then the cheques of donors can start rolling out.

To succeed, you have to persuade others to support your vision, dream or cause. Whether you want to motivate your colleagues, organize your shareholders, shape your media, engage your customers, win over investors or land a job. You have to deliver a clarion call that will get listeners’ attention, emotionalize your goal as theirs and move them, to act in your favour. You have to reach their hearts as well as their minds – and this is just what story telling does!

So stories teach, model, unite and motivate by transporting audience emotionally. Story telling is a secret sauce of success, it could be your past experiences, etc, that will endear others to your goal or cause.

How do you unite a disparate group to fight for their future when none believe they can or should work together?

Answer: By moving every member to feel and therefore believe that by pulling together, we all could gain in security, opportunity, achievement and pride.

Find below a story of resilience, being told by a CEO, to motivate his people. It is the story of a young boy with crippling degenerative disease, who lived near him when he was growing up in Boston.

“The boy’s speech was garbled. He couldn’t walk and he wasn’t able to go to school like the rest of us in the neighborhood. But I could see him at his window everyday watching us bicycle up and down the block.

One day his father appeared on the sidewalk hauling a bicycle with training wheels on the front and back. This six-wheeler looked as if an elephant could ride it without falling. As I watched from my window, the boy’s father carried him out, put him on the contraption. Then the father went back inside.

The kid started to pedal and in a minute the bike tripped over. I could see the father in his window watching. So could the boy. His dad watched him lying there and did nothing.  Finally the boy pulled himself up and then went about three feet and fell to the other side. Again the father stood watching. For weeks, that kid kept trying and falling and the father didn’t lift a finger. I complained to my mother, but she told me to mind my business. I couldn’t, the drama was so seductive.

One Saturday morning, the boy crashed off the curb.  I had to go down. But when I reached the sidewalk, the kid waved me off. Then the father tapped on the window glass and shook his finger at me to go away. Convinced, he must be some kind of monster, I left the boy trying to pull himself up and ran back home.

Then a couple of days later, the kid was out there again, over he went, and up he went again.

But then suddenly he was rolling! He made about sixty feet then he turned around and rode all the way back without falling. I looked up and there was a father grinning down at his son. I looked up at the boy and he was beaming up at his father. Then they both started laughing and waving like crazy.  And I started to cry.

Finally, I got it! They both knew the boy needed to face the challenges and struggle through it on his own. He needed to be his own agent of change, to be active in his own rescue. If his father did it for him, the boy wouldn’t feel like a hero.  And only if he was the hero would this seminial victory empower him to face the other inevitable and monumental challenges that lay in this boy’s future.

The joy I felt in the kid’s little sixty-foot bike ride was overwhelming, my experience of his unique challenge, struggle, and triumph became an archetypal tale of persistence that I told myself every time I face challenges. The story of the boy taught me that failure really is just a speed bump on the road to success. Heroes don’t quit, so the only true failure is the failure to get up. This story’s call to action was to keep ‘getting up’.”