Are you excited or not?
(Audience) Yes.
I try again, are you excited or not?
(Audience) Yes.
You seem really excited, now.
Here is a picture for you to cool down.
Don't laugh; this is where I grew up.
OK, I am leaving!
I grew up there, I have a very exciting life, in a council flat,
and my grand mother lived on the 11th floor,
you will be cleverer when going to bed tonight,
you did not expect to learn that from a TEDx, I suppose.
This, you will never forget,
Idriss Aberkane's grandmother lived on the 11th floor of this block.
Why do I show this to you?
Because I am actually convinced that in the world that surrounds us,
all the objects we create and that surround us can speak,
we can ask them why they are there.
All the objects we created, which are part of our daily life, our environment
can be asked, "Little object, little product, little service,
why are you there?"
I am convinced if we really asked objects around us why they are there,
the huge majority would answer,
"I am there because there is a market, idiot."
Check this with the objects around you,
most of them are there because there is a market.
Actually, the people who made them don't use them.
The people who built that tower don't live there, no.
There are objects which are not there because there is a market,
and then, we have objects one even wonders why they are there at all.
This block for example, my grandmother did not live there,
it has been the highest tower in the Christian world for very long,
Strasbourg Cathedral,
but here, it is an object that if asked,
"Why are you there little building?"
It will answer, "I'm here because mum and dad loved each other very much."
These are exceptional objects
Whether they are goods, products, or services,
but it can even be buildings such as Sydney Opera or the Eiffel Tower,
the Eiffel Tower which was to be disassembled, since useless.
Ask the Eiffel Tower, "Why are you there?"
"I'm here because mum and dad loved each other very much."
It's not rational.
With a business plan, it would not have been built.
I am here to talk about this actually,
what makes TED specificity in general,
why is TED so special?
We will see in fact that it is precisely passion and love.
But, before that, I will tell you something
which may not seem exciting.
Right now, we are undertaking a knowledge transaction.
I give you the knowledge, and you give me two things in exchange.
Which ones? What are you giving me right now?
(Audience) Attention, love,
IA: Attention - we will talk about love later - and time.
In fact, if you want to buy knowledge,
you need attention and time in exchange.
That is the equation I discovered in Stanford,
it doesn't bite, don't worry, it is really kind,
it describes what you are going to do today at TEDx:
you are going to give attention and time to the speaker.
To buy knowledge, you need to pay with attention multiplied by time.
Let's check it is indeed a product,
A product means that if one of the 2 is equal to 0, the whole equals 0.
If you give me one hour of your time, but are not focused,
there will be no exchange of knowledge.
You should give me your whole attention and all your time.
This is the currency in the knowledge economy.
To learn something, you have to pay with attention and time.
And the good news with this equation is that we all have both from birth.
Yes, the young Somali is not born with pocket money,
but he has attention and time.
The knowledge economy is therefore the only economy
where everybody is born with a buying power,
which is good news!
Under what conditions
do we give our whole attention and all our time to someone?
How is this called?
Love.
When you love someone,
you lavishly give him or her your whole attention and all your time.
The knowledge economy is the only one
which maximizes the lovers' purchasing power.
Literally, if you want to learn faster,
make sure you fall in love first
with the knowledge you will learn.
This is what the story of my work and my findings are about:
what is the role of love in the economy, which is supposed to be prosy?
At Stanford, when I dealt with this, people understood quite well.
But in France when I said, "Well,
let's talk a little about love in companies,"
no kidding, people would not understand.
So, I told them, "Well, to maximize the flow of knowledge,
you need to love what you do,
the main point is to love your job,
you will turn out to be more competitive."
But apparently, I had not found the proper words,
above all with managers, as I was teaching in Centrale, and it is specific.
So I thought, "We're in Descartes homeland let's make a diagram,
let's draw something really Cartesian."
I called it, "Love Can Do,"
and I wondered, "What are the companies with a little difference,
those slightly standing out?"
It is the ones which do what they can do.
So I thought, let's take the Can Do axis:
can I do my job?
But we are going to add another axis,
and we'll stick to the good old Cartesian diagram,
and we are going to add some love;
forgive me to add some love into a Cartesian diagram.
Let's consider another thing, "Let's organize the companies,
or not just the companies, by the way, but any initiative,
according to what people love to do and what they can do."
The company which does what it loves and what it can do
is the company standing out,
that doesn't mean it is the leader,
it means there is you, and then there's the rest of the world.
Typically, we mention Apple.
What does "standing out" mean?
Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow have a daughter.
Chris Martin, singer of Coldplay, and Gwyneth Paltrow, Hollywood star.
How do they call here? Apple.
Who is going to call their daughter Samsung?
(Laughter)
That is standing out.
It makes you laugh because it is standing out.
Then, there is the follower,
the one who does his job right, he can do it, he handles it,
but he doesn't care about love.
And, excuse me,
but Samsung didn't go from making toilets to making tablets
just because they loved it, there was a market.
When the market was there, they just went for it.
That is the case for the vast majority of companies.
There is a market, they go for it.
That is the follower.
The difference between the follower and the leader,
the one standing out,
is, "Do I like the job,
or do I only do it because there is a market?"
Talking of job, you know the joke,
we say the Americans have Steve Jobs and the French have Pôle Emploi.
(Laughter)
There is no video editing for TEDx, the joke is on me.
(Applause)
Then, you have other players,
my favorite being the garage in the Silicon Valley.
All those companies that were founded in garages.
What does that mean that today they are there,
I mean up there?
What does it mean?
That means a maximum of love and a minimum of know-how.
That's how Google and Amazon were created.
That is how Tesla, Apple, Hewlett Packard and Disney were created.
Yes, Disney created Alice in Wonderlands
in a garage in Los Angeles.
Please, don't look for any wordplay.
(Laughter)
Oh, humor.
The garages in the Silicon Valley don't do a job
because they know how to,
they don't know anything about it, but they love it.
The garage is going to select the ones who love it,
because there are no grades, no prices,
you won't get a regional price for competitiveness,
you won't get anything,
you won't be able to pick somebody saying, "I work in a garage."
You cannot write that on your resume.
There is no award,
no grade, no diploma, there is only what you do.
The garage selects the enthusiasts, the ones who are passionate about the job,
the ones who love it.
And so, when you mix love and incompetence,
you get the result,
"Sorry guys, I didn't know it was impossible so I did it."
That is typical of the Silicon Valley's companies that were created in a garage.
As we were telling them, "Guys, that is impossible,"
they just did it because they had no manuals to hold them back.
Obviously, the worst thing is that we have those kind of players,
the compelled incomers.
It is easy to sum it up,
if you ask them, "Why do you make your products?"
"Because I had to.
I wanted to be a vet but I was told to make that product, so I did."
The best example is, you might know it, the brand Lada,
or the Russian words in general.
A friend of mine met a marabout in Africa,
and like all great marabouts, he had the list of all his miracles:
the loved-one coming back, glory, beauty, ingrown nail healing, all of it,
and his concluding claim was: can even start Russian motorcycles?
(Laughter)
There is walking on water, and then there is starting a Russian motorcycles.
That tells a lot about Russian motorcycles,
and you clearly wouldn't dream about a Russian motorcycle.
One we have that diagram,
we see that if the follower wants to stand out,
there is only one question to ask,
and you'll see that it fits perfectly with this TEDx's theme,
the upward direction --
do you want some self-consistency?
(Laughter)
They have to ask themselves, "Why do I do my job?"
For the compelled incomers,
the red arrow pointing down is the path to suffering,
because you get the knowledge but do not have the love of the job.
You are in this mode,
"Why are you working?" "Because I have to."
That is suffering, that is committing suicide at work, it is hell.
The garage in the Silicon Valley, on the other hand, obtains
all his knowledge out of love.
He does the job because he loves it,
and he is going to get all his expertise on the path to love.
That path, I called it El Camino Real,
that is the avenue in the Silicon Valley.
That avenue which structures the Silicon Valley
is called the royal road in Spanish, El Camino Real,
and that's how I called this transition.
Because the Google, the Apple, the Walt-Disney, the Hewlett-Packard
have followed this way.
The ones who followed it the most and which illustrate best Love Can Do,
that's Tesla.
Tesla is typically the company
which didn't know anything about its competitors..
So almost all the decisions they made
were completely dumb and irrational.
On that frame, you can see an illustration of Love Can Do.
On this picture, you can see the Love and the Can Do.
That is what love is, that is this engine.
In fact, when Elon Musk founded Tesla,
he asked his engineers for an engine that was invented by Nicolas Tesla,
because he is a fan of Tesla, the second da Vinci of the 20th century.
So he told his engineers,
"I want an engine that was invented by Nicolas Tesla."
If you think about it,
that is dumb, as dumb as asking Airbus for a Leonard de Vinci's technology.
So the engineers replied, "Well, that is dumb."
And Elon Musk said, "I am the one paying,
so you are going to make a N. Tesla's engine, and shut up."
This engine which gives nightmares
to the entire global automotive establishment
is an engine that was patented by Nicolas Tesla in 1896.
That is love,
because it is no rational decision.
You rationally won't beat your competitors with a thing from the 19th century.
"I am just passionate about Tesla," so here it is.
Can Do is the battery in this.
You don't see it now, but they will be put onto the frame
and Can Do is a car with batteries,
we didn't have good returns so Elon Musk said,
"Wait, does a laptop have a good battery?"
"Yeah, it's not bad."
The new Mac had a good battery.
"Fine, just take some of these and pile them up."
That's what they did.
Love Can Do.
The epitome of Love Can Do - we won't talk about it for long,
it would be an inter-TEDx - it is the Wright brothers,
they were entirely made of Love Can Do,
they had no diploma.
While guys in Polytechnique, the MIT, the Royal Society
wanted to make their first plane fly,
the ones who made it fly
were two idiots, 60km away from Dayton, Ohio,
and who hadn't graduated from High School,
and that was because they crashed five times a day.
An excellent TED speaker said it better than me,
his name is Simon Sinek
- spend a minute with Simon Sinek, it is better than my TEDx.
I can tell you that, seriously, Simon Sinek.
The conclusion of Love Can Do for me
is that, no matter the expertise,
you saw it: attention times time,
when you learn something,
your learning, if you are passionate,
is going to take theses steps:
5, 50, 500, 5,000, maybe 50,000 hours.
In 5 hours, you get into any knowledge,
in 50 hours you are autonomous, in 500 hours you can teach it,
at 5,000 there are the first Nobel Prizes,
and at 50,000 you get what Japanese call
a living national treasure.
I insist on saying that it only works if you learn because your are passionate,
you have a maximum attention.
I will show you a case of living national treasure,
Wallace Chan, the best jeweler in the world.
That guy is standing out,
that guys has 100,000 hours of doing what he does,
that is exceptional, no jeweler can do it like he does.
I will just who you one of his creations that shows Love Can Do,
the guy made a portrait in an aquamarine.
That is called the Wallace Cut, he can cut out a portrait
that is reflected on all the facets of the aquamarine.
Why? Because he loves it,
and when you ask him, "Do you want to go on holidays?"
He says, "In my workshop, I am already on holidays,
that is the only thing that satisfies me."
Today, you are going to see lots of speakers
who will illustrate Love Can Do better than I can.
Because I am only talking about theory,
they are going to talk about practice.
The speaker coming up right after me will talk to you about love in companies,
and you will see exactly what Love Can Do can result in.
And so on, for the Veilles Charrues music festival, etc.
All I want you to do now,
is consider Love Can Do in your life,
and I want you to say something extremely simple,
that is that every economically useful human being might not be fulfilled,
but every fulfilled human being is necessarily economically useful.
So let's value fulfillment more than economical usefulness.
Have an excellent day.
(Applause)