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