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.
After a few years I came back to France,
and when people would ask me:
“What do you do in life?”
I would reply,
“I’m a filmmaker. I make movies.
I’m just back from a few years in L.A.”
I would often see a sparkle in their eyes
as they'd say, "That's amazing!
What films do you do?
Can we see them at the movie?
Have you worked with famous people?”
And I would reply,
“I direct mostly fiction."
My films don't play at the movie theatre
- not yet. And 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 "I make films"
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 I had to apologize for my lack of success.
I began to feel a bit weird about it though.
I started to wonder: "Why do you lie about what you do?"
And why do you 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 at how it has evolved in the last few years,
especially with social media's arrival in our lives that reminds 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 visited 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 already found myself listening to 24-year-olds
explaining to me that they had abandoned a dream or an idea
before they had even started.
And the reason why they had given up before even trying
is because they were paralyzed 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: it was the date of our death.
Today we have a second expiration date in our lives, and it's
our social expiration date.
The idea that when we do something, its value must be recognized and
measurable to exist.
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,
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 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 the 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,
Heider and Simmel discovered that 33 out of 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 to confirm
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 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 paralyzes so many people today.
Earlier I said 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,
and who embodies strong ideas.
And currently, we are living through an extremely interesting period.
Just like archeologists,
we are digging out new stories, different stories.
Stories of people who often did not receive immediate and positive feedback
about the worth of what they were doing and who,
5, 50, 100, 200, 500 years later
end up at the center of the storytelling 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, in 1971, when she was 63, decided 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 cliff's erosion.
Georgina created a whole system that she patented.
She presents her project to the coast guards,
they listen to her and say:
“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
to prevent the lighthouse from falling down.
And she will succeed.
Georgina died in 2001, but the lightouse 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 changed their story and sometimes History
in unexpected ways.
It’s thanks to a story fabricator
that 200,000 French people and myself, have been inspired
by Georgina and her determination to fight for something
that mattered to her even though officially she was told it didn't.
Georgina was able to become a good story because she was
an active actress of her story.
She didn’t settle for wishing that the lighthouse wouldn't fall down.
No, she did what she had to do to make sure the lighthouse
wouldn’t fall down.
And this word, “doing”,
is one of the three steps to become a good story.
In reality, the recipe to become a good story is simple.
Well, it fits into three steps.
First, you have to listen to your intuition,
to hear what each one of us individually, really want to do.
And once you’ve listened to it,
you need to muster the courage to go for it, and do it.
And once you’ve had the courage to do it,
you need to repeat.
Every day, you need to do it again.
Today we are under a lot of pressure when it comes to the projects
we decide to pursue.
They need to have a goal.
If they don't have a goal, then they are not serious.
And if they are not serious, then they are worth nothing.
I completely disagree with this way of thinking.
If there’s one thing I've learned this past decade,
hunting and fabricating stories,
it's that the value of what we do is not fixed in time.
The value of what we do can have a surprising impact
in five years, in fifty years, after our death or
our great-grand-children’s death.
So there’s no point to try picking something that will have
an impact instantaneously.
We can’t know if it will happen.
We should just keep on doing.
And these three steps: listening to yourself,
going for it, and doing it again,
they are crystallized in Carmen Herrera’s story.
Carmen Herrera was born in La Havana in 1915.
At a young age she realizes that what she really wants to do
is paint.
So she paints, every day.
And then she realizes that she creates minimalist abstract paintings,
exactly at the time when abstract minimalism is trendy.
Perfect.
She sells her first painting, and then nothing.
She exhibits her work, the audience doesn't respond.
She tries to find galleries that would exhibit her work,
everybody says no.
And then one day,
Carmen is offered the opportunity to exhibit her work again,
and this time people love it.
We are in 2004 at that point, Carmen is 89.
Today Carmen is 103.
These past 14 years, her paintings have been exhibited
presented in some of the most prestigious museums in the world.
For 60 years Carmen Herrera has created daily,
paintings that nobody thought had any value.
And then one day,
Carmen Herrera’s story has aligned with Art’s History.
If I tell you this story, it is not to tell you that success always comes.
Because it’s not the case.
But it’s because I'm convinced that Carmen Herrera would still
be painting today, even if she had never found
her audience while she was alive.
Carmen Herrera didn’t paint to become famous.
She painted because it was giving meaning to her life.
It’s not success that gives meaning to our life
it’s being self-expressed.
And when we are fully expressed,
our social expiration date vanishes.
When we are fully expressed,
our failures as well as our successes
become simply steps,
on the graph of our personal growth.
Tonight what I want to suggest is to shift your focus
away from what you cannot control.
We cannot control how people are going to react to what we do.
But we can control what we do.
So, let’s stop paying attention to society’s feedback
about the value of what gives meaning to our lives.
Because we rarely can measure the value of what we do right after doing it.
And more importantly because the value of what we do will evolve unexpectedly
over time.
Today, when I meet people and they ask me what I do in life,
I tell them that I am a story fabricator.
Nobody really understands what it means but it's okay,
because if I have the chance to talk a little bit more with them,
they understand that fabricating stories is my way to express myself fully
and daily, doing.
For the last ten years,
I’ve been hunting and fabricating stories that I share as screenplays, films, lyrics
drawings, podcasts or graphic novels.
Sometimes, I doubt.
I feel that what I’m doing is completely useless.
And then I remember that my intuition is probably whispering something to me
and that I should probably listen to it.
So I listen to it, I go for it, and then I repeat the process.
If tomorrow when you wake up you feel like doing something "useless",
listen to yourself, go for it, and repeat the process.
Because it’s by being active actors of our story that we will become
good stories.
Stories that other human beings will be able to use and share
to move forward.
Do what you have to do,
never mind if it feels useless.
If it’s important to you, then it's worth doing.
Express yourself,
and we, the story fabricators,
we will find you.
Thank you.