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
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 you 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 picking the projects
we decide to pursue.
We need to have a goal.
there’s no goal, then it’s not serious.
And if it’s not serious
then our projects don’t have any value.
I completely disagree with this way of thinking.
If there’s one thing
I’ve learned this past decade
hunting and fabricating stories,
it is 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,
fifty years, after our death
or our great-grand-children’s death.
So there’s no point to try
doing 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 repeating
are crystallized in Carmen Herrera’s story.
Carmen Herrera was born in La Havana in 1915.
At a young age she realized
that what she really wanted to do was to paint.
So she painted, every day.
And then she realised that she created
minimalist abstract paintings
exactly at the time when abstract minimalism was trendy
Perfect
She sold a first painting. And that was it.
She exhibited her work, the audience didn’t respond.
She tried to find a gallery
who would show her work, everybody said no.
And then one day,
Carmen was offered the opportunity
to exhibit her work again
and this time people loved it.
That was in 2004, Carmen was 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 she have been creating daily
paintings that nobody thought had value.
And then one day,
Carmen Herrera’s story has aligned with Art’s History.
If I tell you this story
it’s not to say that success always arrives.
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
an audience for her work while she was alive.
Carmen Herrera didn’t paint
in order 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 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.
Especially because the value of what we do
will evolve in unexpected ways 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,
, it is my way of 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 trying to whisper something to my ear
and that I should listen to it.
So I listen, I go for it, and I repeat.
If tomorrow,
you wake up wanting to do something “useless”,
listen to yourself, do it, and repeat.
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 doesn’t seem useful.
If it’s important to you
then it’s worth doing.
Express yourself and we,
the story fabricators, we will find you.
Thank you