Comment devient-on une bonne histoire ? | Nathalie Sejean | TEDxReims

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.