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 "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

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 media's 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 female 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 has 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