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Hello my delicious creators
I am Lilou and currently at the zen trade fair
and with me today is Vincent Cespedes. It's really nice to see you again
after our first interview, which was such a success
100,000 people have watched it! Yes, that's right
it's been really incredible - I didn't expect such a success.
I didn't know you very well beforehand, but having watched some of your videos
I am really pleased to be here! It was really a nice interview.
We talked about your other film, which is called Man explained to women.
I mean your book obviously.. Well, film or book – it's the same idea.
Man explained to women that's what it's called.
How do you explain that so many people liked this video?
I think a lot of people felt concerned by the issues we were discussing.
People are desperate nowadays they want to talk about love, partnership,
marriage and its problems, about their lovers, their affairs etcetera.
I think we told them something new. Love should be fresh and everybody
should live it the way he or she feels and not how
they are told to live it. Love has no rules. People like hearing this message,
because it gives them back their autonomy
as to love. I think this is very important. How do you pick your book titles?
Your latest one is called “Ambition or One's Own Epic Poetry”. It's
your 15th book. What made you want to talk ambition?
Because in French, ambition is a curse word.
To an extent that you have to say something like noble ambition
or generous ambition to specify that we are not just talking
about someone who is aiming high, but that
this is something which will move forward
the whole world. And I find that interesting.
Ambition is a taboo word in France, unlike in the US, where everybody
is ambitious, which also waters down the term ambition.
After all, we talk about ambition every day,
but we don't really know what it means. It took me 3 years to write this book.
I have read hundreds and hundreds of biographies of ambitious people...
Biographies of whom? Everybody from Julius Cesar to Rihanna.
Ambitious people are everywhere, in sports, science, politics, and you too
are certainly ambitious – in a certain way In a humanistic sense of the word
Of course, I hope so. And it looks like it judging from your viewers and
the comments they are making. I think ambition means that
one is not happy with the status quo. It's like saying I could do better.
This is what ambition is about. We could go faster, further,
earn more money, this is one way of seeing things.
Or we could have a better world, change society,
bring more love to the world. Ambition is the opposite of narcism.
A narcissist is someone who looks at himself and is more than happy
with what he sees. An ambitious person is not pleased
with himself. He'd like to be happy, but right now he's disappointed with
himself It's really interesting.
Ambition is such a taboo word in our society
and yet, we can't get rid of it. It always sneaks back into the conversation.
It's disturbing, complicated, we are obsessed with this word.
We call so many projects ambitious, but we don't know how to come up
with something like collective ambition in a team or a company.
Ambition is a paradox, we don't know how to handle it
and no philosopher had talked about it for the past 2,500 years!
I think my book is even the first book ever
on ambition – till proven otherwise. There are many Californian books
on success and how to succeed, but no philosophical theory, which explains
what ambition actually is. But it's difficult to talk about ambition
in France, because people are jealous and
think of it as something negative. They feel uncomfortable
when you talk about ambition. That's right. It's because of our
democratic system that we have a problem
with the word ambition. We used to live in a court society.
There were noble people who were destined
to own a castle later on, our career was predetermined
when we were born. So in that society, everybody had the
same ambition as their parents, as other people with the same social background.
Ambition wasn't a problem. But it is an issue in democracy,
which works in a meritocratic way. That is, you are allowed
to have the ambition which corresponds to your skills,
to the expertise you acquire, your way of being
and the diplomas you complete. There is no limit to your ambition.
The problem is that as a company boss we want our children to also become
bosses just like what's happened in India.
In its essence, Hinduism is not a caste system.
People don't become warriors because their dad is a warrior.
They become warriors because they are good at warfare.
People become Brahmans because they are good leaders.
And it's only because parents wanted to pamper their children,
that they have decided that your destiny is set out when you are born.
This has transformed a meritocratic system
into a caste system. We have the same problem
with ambition in France. We make everybody believe
that ambition works. Disadvantaged children for example,
a child born into the working class. We make them believe
that they have the right to be ambitious that they can become journalists,
lawyers or even President of France But in reality, we prevent them
from having a career by blocking the access to the education
they'd need for such a career. And one of the best ways
of blocking the access is transforming the word ambition
into a curse word. That being said,
ambition is not a curse word in good houses
where daddy and mummy have loads of money.
There, you even should be ambitious. Everything else would be a problem.
But in poorer areas, we tell people that ambition is a bad thing
through anti-ambition ads and even education.
So the educational system teaches each pupil
that even if a child is inquisitive at 8
and full of joie de vivre, at the age of 16,
he won't like reading books, he will be jaded and pessimistic.
This is how we destroy people's ambition, which, normally, is the youth's privilege!
But there are a lot of youngsters at 17, 18 or older, who are ambitious.
The problem is just that we are stuck in our old ways of thinking.
You need to develop, you have to get to the point where you
say I want to achieve this, to express myself.
And although I think people in our society want to express themselves
there are certain limits for example for people like me
I am the child of a restaurant owner and others have other limits
for example those whose parents are immigrants...
Let me tell you about my greatest discovery
while I was writing this book, reading so many biographies and
trying to understand how Julius Cesar or Rihanna had become ambitious.
We often think that ambitious people react to a personal failure they
experienced often when they were young.
For example, a high proportion of ambitious people have lost their father
when they were young . Statistically there is a high proportion of
orphans amongst ambitious people. Psychologists would analyse this
in a very classic way. This person has realised very early on
that life is difficult, that you have to work twice as hard
so he has fought a lot more than his companions in the sandbox.
In that sense, ambition is a way of putting an end to a childhood trauma.
But I have realised this is not true. We don't become ambitious
because we have failed as hardship like loosing a parent
can also break us, inhibit us and make us afraid of life.
And although one of the orphans is often ambitious, most of the time,
his or her siblings aren't. No, I have realised that
what makes us become ambitious is when one of our tutors,
like a father or a mother, fails. Someone we trust and who talks to a
child like the child is an adult.
He will tell us about his suffering, his problems, his regrets,
what I'd call his “alas”. Alas is a magical word for children
but when adults say alas, they are desperate
and think they won't be able to achieve for what they are striving.
But when a child hears his father say “alas”,
this has two meanings for the child. He will see something great,
which we couldn't achieve. Alas is the promise of something better,
something more. But a father who says alas to his child
sees only the failure in it. Like alas, we don't earn enough money,
alas, I have lost your mother etcetera. But the child, brimming over with life,
with all his potential and a bright future in front of him.
The child will hear the word alas will see something better at the horizon.
He will think that his heros is saying he shouldn't be his heroe.
Because there is someone who can even do better than you.
My tutor, my hero, the person who I want to resemble later on.
The child will think life can be even better than my tutor's life
he will think I am the incarnation of the second chance,
of the next generation. I am the one who knows that life is hard,
but that there are goals in life which my tutor couldn't accomplish.
So I will try to achieve them. I will become ambitious.
Ambition is thus resilience, which is handed down to someone else.
It's somehow a passed-on second chance in life.
And every ambitious person, from Rihanna to Julius Cesar to Obama,
to Hollande, Sarkozy, Ghandi, Mandela, from spiritual people to full-blood
warriors everyone of them has had an encounter
with one of their heroes who has said alas.
This is my alas theory. And this is really something
we didn't know about ambitious people. This is very interesting, indeed.
So Rihanna for example is such a case? Of course. Rihanna grew up in Barbados,
in a needy family. Her father was a drug addict, an
alcoholic. You could think that
she became ambitious because her father was suffering.
But that's not it. Her mother was suffering,
because she didn't manage to preserve her couple.
She couldn't stop her husband from taking drugs and beating her.
Rihanna was born into that family. She didn't put her foot down
because of her alcoholic father. No, it was because she saw her mother cry.
She heard her mother say the magical “alas,
our life could be better”. So Rihanna hears this and revs up.
Granted - some biographers might say that her father also said alas,
that I don't know. This is a whole new area of research.
We should look again into every existing biography to try to understand
who said “alas”. We should investigate
when each great man heard the word “alas”.
We all have our own alas. We do. But only a few of us have an alas
considered as such. Because France is against ambition.
And this is terrible. The French are not allowed
to tell their children about their alas. They are told this could crush their
children. We are afraid of depressing our children.
We do say it a little bit, when we are complaining
and saying that life could be better. But generally speaking,
we are very cautious about this. We are afraid,
we don't want to pass our alas on to our children.
We think that if we tell our child that our life is not the way it should be,
my child will be depressed and think life is dark and hard and exhausting.
But this is wrong. An alas is the best motivation for a child I can think of -
on condition that the alas comes with love.
If we say for example, I couldn't achieve what I wanted but I love you
and you can do better, our child will aim for the summit.
But, alas, I feel like saying, this is not the only way of saying alas.
Most of the time, it doesn't come with love.
You can also use the word alas just to complain about your situation.
And you don't feel like saying my child, you can do better. No, you are suffering
and all you transmit is this suffering. Then, your alas comes with sourness,
frustration, animosity towards life or anger.
In 70 percent of these cases, the parents will say, alas, my life
has not been a success, and you, my child,
who is even worse than me, you are the next generation and you have
even less of a chance to succeed. I even don't want you to succeed.
It might seem outrageous to say something like this,
but you will discover this scheme in a lot of biographies.
Ambitious people have a hostile father who says alas about his own life
and then goes on to crush his child telling him or her not to succeed.
Or perfectionist mothers, who destroy their children's life?
Exactly. This is the other half of the cases.
And there is a third way of passing on one's alas.
That is a father who says, alas, I haven't succeeded in life,
but life is too difficult to succeed. Us, our family, our clan, our culture,
can't be successful in life. This is not a hostile message.
The father is saying I love you, son, but, alas, you can't be successful either.
So in a way, the father will make his son feel guilty about success and victory.
And this is the second fact I discovered while writing this book.
It's an absolute novelty. You really are passionate about this
topic... It's easy to be passionate about ambition.
And it's the first book on the subject. I had to go through
all the existing literature – it was like going through the jungle
with a machete to find a treasure. And I think I did find
some parts of this treasure. So what happens when you transmit
a pessimistic vision of life to your child? That is life is difficult
and you can't change this. Well, your child will feel guilty
when he succeeds. The child will do everything to be
successful his parents will say “you have to be
top of the class, but don't you boast of it. It's a paradox – be the best, but hide
away, success is nothing to be proud of.
Christian faith can lead to such a schizophrenic way of thinking.
Well, this gives the child a head start. A good writer for example will
write a successful book or an actor will be applauded by critics
or a scholar will come up with extraordinary theories by the age of 20.
But when success kicks in, he will do whatever is necessary to fail.
He needs to climb higher to fall farther. So after his first success
he will crash to the ground. There are many examples of
ambitious people like this. Freud used to call this social masochism,
this will to suffer. But it isn't masochism -
it's a form of ambition, a way of failing with big noise.
It works the same way as ambition does. You start drinking -
alcohol is the classic way of destroying what could have been a great career.
There are even illnesses which can develop
like cancer. They are our body's way of saying stop, your career ends
here. You can also develop a horrible character.
Some people want to fail somehow, they'll do everything to antagonize others
like some actors in Hollywood who start fighting with everybody else.
Some people are just full of themselves or
have a huge ego though... Being big-headed is
along the lines of the forms of ambition I have described.
Let me just give you the names of the different sorts of ambition
I have identified. The first one, passed on with love,
leads to a humanistic, expressive ambition.
I want to express something inside me. I call this expressive ambition.
I don't care about glory or success, I just want to express something,
which is inside me. This is a nice type of ambition.
There is the second type of ambition, which is transmitted with hostility.
You shouldn't be successful just as I, alas, wasn't successful.
Alas, this is the most common one. This leads to what I call
demonstrative ambition. I want to show to my parents that
I am not a good-for-nothing, that I can succeed. I am ambitious
and competing with the eldest. And this is horrible
because this is a bling-bling ambition, where I am willing to cheat and lie,
it's a narcissist's way of doing politics. For example?
Almost all our politicians today are a perfect example apart from a few.
But both Sarkozy and Melenchon have this type of demonstrative ambition.
Even if each has his own distinctive programme and party.
But both are repeating “Me, me, me – look at me”.
You are talking about the past. But how can we change our destiny
and transform this alas into something else?
We can't. It's our essence. Oh, this is good news.
It is. An alas is somehow programming you.
It creates an urgency inside of you. And this is what's needed
for every kind of ambition. You will tell yourself –
there is an opportunity I can't miss. My tutor has missed the opportunity of
a better life, but I won't. So you feel it's urgent to act.
You have the choice of either doing something about it or not
and there is a real opportunity to act. You are lucky, because you,
unlike your mates, know that life is hard and that you have to fight hard,
even though you don't know if you will win this fight,
because the only example you can see is your tutor, who has failed.
So you transform this urgency into passion.
You can for example become passionate about the human cosmic soul,
which you are passionate about. Or you can be passionate about tennis,
like Yannick Noah, or about science no matter what you are passionate about,
all you have to do is take the urgency you are feeling and transform it into
a passion for something. People generally become passionate
when they are young. Diderot for example was passionate
about learning and has come up with an encyclopedia.
He was 30 at the time and would have turned 300 in 2013.
Diderot was blond, a Depardieu look-alike,
taking Paris by storm at the age of thirty. He was miserable,
no-one knew him, he was starving. Paris was a difficult city to live in,
but he was passionate about learning. No matter what you are passionate about,
if it's meteorites, singing, your inner urgency has to become a
passion But there is a third step needed for
real ambition. Because you might as well just live
a passionate life. But when you are ambitious,
you want to show yourself in society, you want to be known,
you want to have an impact or, talking about megalomania, you want
to open a new chapter of history,
you want to be someone in history and a street, an asteroid or
a public square will be called after you. So if you're ambitious,
you want to do politics, you want people and society
to acknowledge your achievements. So there is this third step to ambition.
Oh, people are having a good time over there.
And this third level is I am passionate about something
and this passion will become my passion. I will be passionate about
me being passionate. This is what real ambition is about.
I am passionate about tennis, well, I'd like to become a tennis champion.
I will play tennis, climb the ranking list, but I don't want to shine brightly,
win a trophy or a grand slam. But I am passionate about my passion
for tennis and I want to dedicate my whole existence to this passion.
But I have got the impression that you can also be eaten up by your passion.
You are obsessed with it, led by it, and you can't do anything about it.
This is what happens to me with the tele de lilou project –
the travels and interviews I do. I can't resist this passion!
This is why ambition is a form of craziness.
It's a form of monomania, of partial insanity.
You get up in the morning thinking of your ambition and you go to bed
thinking of it, too. Your whole life is organised around
your ambition. Not every ambitious person is like that.
Some will try to balance out their professional with their private lifes.
But the real ambitious person dedicates his whole existence to his
passion. This is how you define ambition
and nothing will stop the ambitious. So at the beginning, you are free,
you can pick your passion, meet the people
you want to meet, say yes or no, but once you are trapped in this
ambitious loop, the outside world doesn't count any more.
Everything is about my passion, my desire,
my pleasure, my progress, you create what I call the vortex.
You are talking about this in your book. And this is something else
I discovered while writing this book. Vortex is latin for whirlwind. It's a weather
phenomenon, a cyclone, a hurricane. An ambitious person will become
a whirlwind in life. He will carry away everything.
Every detail in life will be used to feed his ambition.
This means that a writer for example will talk about his writing to all his
friends, tell them that he is writing a book,
it'll be great, I will talk about it to everybody,
and I will even ask my friends what do you think about my book,
could you read my script or help me to arrange for an interview
with a certain journalist. This is nothing but a passion
which is expressing itself. But, if one day, I stop writing my book,
all those I told about my book will ask, weren't you writing a book?
And they will come up to me and force me write this book.
So the initial form of freedom I was having
will turn into something which will obsess me, because my vortex,
my friends, the financial means I have gathered to write the book,
will oblige me to write the book. we are all prisoners of our own vortex,
even if we ourselves set it off. So if you stop doing la tele de lilou,
you will have loads of admirers who will become depressive and oblige
you, take you hostage, to force you to
continue doing what you are doing.
This is why ambition is so scary. Once we get going,
we won't be able to stop. Great. What else are you talking about
in your book? I know you are mentioning a lot of different things in there.
Would you like to sum it up in a short message?
Yes. I have defined
three types of ambitions: expressive ambition,
demonstrative ambition and censoring ambition,
where you censor yourself. And one of them should be preserved.
That is, expressive ambition. The ambition of an artist, a humanist,
Mandela's ambition. I have a idea and I will endure prison for it
without giving in.
I will stick to my believes, because I know this will create
a fairer system. Expressive ambition is always about
either, in the case of artists, a more poetic world
or a fairer world. To me, these two things are the same.
We need to preserve this type of ambition.
But today, our school system is opposed to ambition just like many
parents. They don't want to say alas
and push their child forward, even if he frenetically loves playing
chess, he should do loads of other things,
otherwise he will go crazy. Oh my God, he is passionate,
he will go crazy. We are very set in our ways
and don't want to empower passion for the sake of reason.
But I think we should allow full bent to this kind of ambition,
on a political and societal level. We should join forces for this.
Our politicians are letting us down. we should ally in a spiritual,
psychological, philosophical and political way.
So that expressive ambition has a way of expressing itself.
Today, we all desperate, but separately so.
Everybody is crying on their own, at home, at their shrink's.
We don't manage to create a political link any more.
But we should all go out in the street and cry together,
this is how politics start off. And then we will realise that others are
crying for the same reasons as we are. Mobbing at work, psychological
harassment, being incapable of
having profound relationships, not having the right to have
several partners at a time. Maybe if we are all crying
for the same reasons, we can join forces
to change the rules of the game. Every ambitious person is
capable of doing this. I think there is ample scope
for such a collective ambition. Joint ambition can be a solution to the
crisis we are in, which is a crisis of ambition.
Ambition is possible where being in contact
with other ambitious people makes us more intelligent.
And this can give birth to new initiatives... Yes, this creates impressive new
initiatives. Initiatives for freedom for example.
But look, the entire French society cherishes failure.
It's bon ton to start off a conversation by complaining about something.
Look at what you can watch on TV. It's an endless lament.
I have lost my parents, when I was a kid. I am unwell.
Like the daily news programme for example,
which is a show of the worst ambitions you can have, an accumulation of bad
news. So you can't help but thinking,
being ambitious is horrible, it's a nightmare,
it's hideous. So we should give ambition
and youth more space, because both go together.
There are no youngsters on TV any more except for in reality shows.
Recently, when I was taking part in a debate on TV station France 5.
They were wondering why reality shows had been there for 10 years already.
But you can see that the principle has stayed the same.
It's always about a group of young
prisoners somewhere like in Tahiti, you take them hostage,
you harass and bully them. Obviously, you can criticise this format.
But the real problem is that this is the only time when youngsters
appear on TV. There are no twenty- or thirty-somethings
in any political debate on TV. You have to be old and a man.
There are no youngsters in TV debates on sociology.
Only young artists, poets and rappers or youngsters from suburbs
who destroy things have the right to talk on telly.
All the others are left out of the discussion.
And this is horrible. It's a way of prohibiting ambition.
If we listened to the youngsters, we would hear them talk about ambition,
a better life, that they don't want to have the same life as their parents, make
the same mistakes, I want to create new bonds.
We would hear something intelligent and genuine.
They could talk about their own topics, about rap for example.
They could talk in an intelligent way about futile things.
But reality TV shows us a servile youth, slaves of the respective TV production
in order to correspond to advertisers' expectations.
This youth doesn't exist – it's fiction. So when you talk about ambition,
you should be asking the youth to stand up
for themselves. We should get rid of those
who make the youngsters appear servile. In my book, I am saying we should give
youngsters not absolute power, but the chance to be ambitious.
But society is preventing youngsters from being ambitious,
we should get rid of these limits. You are a father yourself.
Is there something, which you'd like to change right now?
Something which strikes you in particuliar?
Yes, I am concernced that young people are becoming less and less curious.
They are the victims of a system which tells them
that ambition is not good for them. I am not a Marxist.
But you can't help but seeing that rich people exploit the poor
and daze them by debilitating TV programmes.
They are cynical, arrogant, I see them when I appear on TV.
They talk about market share and use young people.
It's the worst side of the human soul that's showing
and they are laughing about it. They become fat and make loads of
money. Young people should be angry
and question this product of society, question authority and rules
according to which you are not allowed to question stupid TV presenters,
because this is part of the game. I say, you can stand up against this,
you can say no, the power of a "no" can be
very fertile if it is carried by the young. But for this, parents have to understand
that the youth will outlive us, they are tomorrow's society,
and adults have to tell children that live is worth living
when you aim higher. And aiming higher,
putting a bit more passion into it, this is what's called ambition.
We have to integrate ambition into our educational system.
I am obviously not talking about the narcissist's kind of ambition
or the heinous type of ambition where you crush everybody else
and my ego is all that counts. But an ambition where I will link up
with everybody else and we will maybe
change life as we know it. This is the type of ambition
I am pleading for, especially for the young.
Thanks, Vincent, I can't wait to read your new great book
“Ambition or One's Own Epic Poetry”. Thank you, Lilou, hope to see you soon.
See you soon. Thanks a lot for watching this interview
feel free to share it. We want to get more than 100,000 clicks
this time - let's be ambitious! Thank you, Lilou.
These are really nice messages which should be spread
not only for our clicks, but just because it's good for us
and our soul. Bye-bye.
A programme brought to you by lateledeLilou.