Ten years ago, I quit my job as a bookseller I packed my luggage and I left Paris to live in Los Angeles. I didn’t know anyone there but I knew that I wanted to make movies so it made sense to go to Hollywood. I came back to France after a few years and when people would ask me: : “What do you do in life?” I would reply: : “I’m a filmmaker. I make movies. Actually, I’m just back from a few years in Los Angeles.” I would oftentimes see a little sparkle in their eyes as they'd say: “That’s amazing! What type of films do you direct? Can we see them at the movie theatre? Have you worked with famous people?” And I would reply: : “I direct mostly fiction. You can’t watch my films at the movie theatre - not yet. And no...no, I haven’t worked with anyone famous.” At that moment there would be a silence long enough for their enthusiasm to go down a few inches And then, we would keep on talking about Los Angeles. Little by little, tired of seeing people’s reaction going from curious to disappointed when they would realize that I was a “wannabe”, I started lying about what I was doing. I stopped saying “I’m a filmmaker” to say “I work as a freelance.” I stopped saying to say “I make videos for clients.” It sounded less dreamy but it was useful and practical. We would talk about how to find clients, how to bill them, about gear. And more importantly, I stopped feeling like like I had to apologize for my lack of success. I began to feel a bit weird about it though , so I asked myself “Why do you lie about what you do? And why do you feel feel compelled to diminish people's expectations so they won’t think you’ve failed?” It’s at that point that I really started to become interested about the concept of “success” and how it has evolved in the last few years, especially with the social medias’ arrival in our lives that remind us daily how we rank on the graph of success compared to the other 8 billion. This ranking on the “success graph” explains why sometimes, when we talk with people, a contest starts to find out who has the most impact. It’s conveyed through innocent words: “I know X person” “X number of people follow me” “I travelled through X number of countries”, “I was a speaker at X event”. Giving a TED Talk is great to win an impact contest. Thank you TED. Power and Success have always existed. And they’ve always been a fuel for some people and obstacles for others. But in the last few years, things have become so intense that I’ve found myself listening to 24-year-olds explaining that they had abandoned a dream or an idea before they had even started. And the reason why they had given up before trying is that they were paralysed by the success of people younger than them that they were witnessing daily on social media. I’ve listened to 24-year-olds explaining to me that if they really had something to achieve on this planet they should have had their breakthrough by now. At 24 they didn’t feel old, they felt expired. We have developed a surprising relationship with what we could call our “expiration date”. We used to have one expiration date: : our death. Today we have a second expiration date in our lives, and it’s our social expiration date. The idea that what we do must be recognised and measurable to have value And if we don’t receive immediately a positive feedback about what we do, or worse, if what we do is deemed useless, ridicule, or a failure , then we feel socially expired. And that’s how some 24-year-olds prefer to go sit on the bench to watch History create itself without them rather than risking to do something and not receive immediately a positive feedback. While I was looking into what “success” means today and into our date of social expiration, I’ve realised that my job is not to write screenplays or direct films, , my job is to fabricate stories. It’s a job that might seem useless but actually, , storytelling is the best way that we, humans, have found to survive. Tonight, if we’ve all come onto this stage to talk to you for 15 minutes one after the other it’s because the best way to convey an idea is to do it with a story. In 2018 we could have made a pdf with each TED Talk’s main idea summed up in one sentence and we could have emailed it to you. Really, we could have done it. It would have cost you less money, and it would have taken us less time. But the power of messages we are trying to share would have evaporated. We know it and you know it. And that’s why you are here tonight , to listen to stories that might open a world of possibilities. In 1944, Professors Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel conducted a test. They showed a video to a group of students and asked them to answer a series of questions to describe what they had seen. I’m going to show you 15 seconds of the video, it’s going to be quick but I invite you to try to answer this question: “What am I seeing on the screen?” That was 15 seconds. When they reviewed the questionnaires, Heidel and Simmel discovered that 33 out of the 34 students had fabricated a story. They had imputed motives, emotions, and behaviours to the geometrical figures that were randomly moving through space that you just saw. This study was one of the first scientific study study that confirmed that our brain understands the world through stories We cannot help but give meaning to the world that surrounds us And to give meaning to the world that that surrounds us, we fabricate stories. Knowing that, that stories are essential to our survival and to our life I want to tell you another story about success. An alternative to the current notion that paralyses so many people today. Earlier I said that that we had two expiration dates: the date of our death and the date of our social expiration that we give to ourselves sooner and sooner. What I did not tell you… is that a phone is ringing right now. What I didn’t tell you is that we all have a joker. We all have the possibility to become a good story. We all have the possibility to become a good story that is going to inspire other human beings and help them move forward. And there’s one group of people whose job is to distribute jokers: the story fabricators. Lucky me: it’s my job. My job is to hunt, to imagine, and to share the stories of people with a surprising, innovating and impactful destiny who are representing strong ideas. And currently we are living through interesting period. Just like archeologists, we are digging out new stories, different stories. Stories of people who often didn’t receive immediate and positive feedback about what they were doing and who, 5, 50, 100, 200, 500 years later end up at the center of the stage to help us, the new generations, to better understand the world and to move forward. For example, some of you might recognize the name of Georgina Reid. A textile designer who decided, in 1971, when she was 63 , that what she really wanted to do was to save her little town’s lighthouse that was at risk of falling down due to the cliffs’ erosion. Georgina created a whole system that she patented. She presented her project to the coast guards, they listened and told her “We won’t prevent you from doing it but we won’t help you out either.” Okay, no problem. For 15 years, helped by her husband and volunteers, Georgina used her knowledge and her time for free to prevent the lighthouse from falling down. And she succeeded. Georgina died in 2001 but the lighthouse is still here. And then 3 years ago a French story fabricator, Pénélope Bagieu, gave a joker to Georgina. She shared Georgina’s story in a graphic novel dedicated to several women who’ve changed their story