You can optimize the wrong things.

You can speed up in the wrong direction.

You can be overwhelmed by work that leads nowhere.

Remember: every step taken in the wrong direction will have to be retraced. These efforts won't just have been in vain—they'll have taken you further from your goal.

So don't throw yourself into action right away.

Sit down. Feel which way the wind blows. The strength of the current.

See what desire drives you. What direction calls to you.

Because once you're on your way, how easy or hard each step feels will depend entirely on that first impulse.

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Related:

• Efficiency doesn't make you happy (French video)

Thanks to Guillaume Cloux for these photos from the Migrul shoot.

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ChezFilms is moving into Télé Bocal's premises in Belleville!

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Really happy with this new place. Especially since I've also changed my pied-à-terre in Paris and I'm not sleeping far from here. (I realized this morning when I walked over and arrived way, way earlier than I'd expected.)

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Related:

• I'm green! (French video)

"What if I took a 25-minute power nap to recharge?"

Opening my eyes two and a half hours later: 

"Who am I? What year is this?"

In the "sometimes we should just leave old hard drives alone" series, I present to you the video "Coronavirus: Jean-Jacques' Advice".

This is an animation test I did with "Adobe Character" back when I was looking for a way to tell stories easily. I had also tried written stories in dialogue form.

It's not in the best taste, you've been warned.

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Related:

• The Scripts (archive)

So today, to sum it up:

• The flotilla bringing food and water to those starving in Gaza has been stopped.
• Trump warns his military generals that they'll now need to treat the internal enemy (Democrats, basically) like an external enemy.
• Jancovici explains that climate regulation mechanisms are reaching tipping points faster than expected.

What makes me sad?

I think it's time to abandon the illusion that we lived in a society of progress where well-intentioned people worked for the common good.

The ending energy abundance made us addicted to a comfort we can no longer do without. Now that the ground is shaking beneath our feet, we turn our anxious gaze toward the most unhinged among us to save us.

The time of peace is over.

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Related:

• It's Not the Best Who Rise to the Top (French video)

One of the videos I made that cracks me up the most but totally bombed. That's life. I'm posting it here again:

For winners only.

I had stopped drinking.

It had decreased naturally, then when I became aware of the hereditary nature of the phenomenon and the place it held in my social life—groups are built on addictions, I realized—I almost completely stopped.

I drink from time to time. "For special occasions."

But I'm realizing that even then, it brings me nothing.

The most powerful and funniest conversations I've had recently took place without a drop of alcohol.

And if you need to drink to enjoy the people around you, it's the people around you that need changing.

If you're a company, school, or organization setting up a small screening room, don't make this mistake I see all too often.

I just came out of a test screening of my film in a corporate auditorium, and I saw the same problem I've seen in many other venues:

The sound comes from two (or more) speakers placed on either side of the room.

People think this will provide stereo sound "like at the movies." But they forget that the main speakers in a cinema are the "center" speakers: the speakers placed right behind the screen that make voices and dialogue come from the characters. The stereo speakers are a "bonus"—which isn't necessarily present in smaller theaters. (This is actually the principle behind so-called "5.1" sound: the center and stereo channels are separate.)

When you install speakers on either side without a center channel, people on the right and left of the room only receive sound from one side (the right ear or the left ear), which quickly becomes exhausting. Moreover, it's disorienting to hear a voice coming from the side when the character you're watching is straight ahead.

So when in doubt: start with center speakers. Good speakers placed up front (below the screen or on either side of the screen but always at the front) will deliver a much more consistent and pleasant result for the audience than stereo without a center.

And I have plenty of films to offer you for your screening room's opening :)

That's what I tell myself when watching the latest videos I've posted. (I post one video a day on social media.)

I'm getting on my own nerves.

That's a good sign: when I can't stand what I'm doing anymore, it means I'm about to level up.

It had already happened to me with photography : I couldn't stand my shots anymore, and when I picked up the camera again after a break, I did something radically different. More personal. Better.

I think I'm already going to set myself some rules:

• One take only. No more retakes.
• No more intro or conclusion. Just the heart of it.
• Never repeat something I've already said – on or off camera.

We'll see how it plays out.

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Related links :

• One video per day (again)
• 300

Still rummaging through old hard drives, I found this:

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It's the poster for a short film project that was supposed to be produced – we had France 2 and a co-producer – but it never materialized.

It was based on a true story (?) that I had read in Planète magazine:

In the 1970s, a group is seated in a circle in a community hall for a workshop. At the end of the session, two men enter; nobody is expecting them. They walk toward one of the participants to ask him "were you sitting in this chair?" The participant nods.

The two men then bring in a cart with a television and a VCR to show him a video. They are researchers and, a few weeks earlier, they filmed an interaction with a person in this very same room.

In the video: "Can you tell us something about one of the participants in the workshop that will take place here?" The person, who turns out to be a psychic, goes through all the empty chairs until stopping at one in particular. Voice-over: "The subject has indicated chair no. 9."

The psychic then begins to make revelations about the future occupant of the chair, which the participant in question follows on the television screen, stunned.

In my version, this was only the first layer of the story. The second layer was that the psychic's statements, while impossible to verify, sowed discord between the young woman (sitting in chair no. 9) and her father who was also present, ultimately forcing her to admit a truth she had always hidden.

Or how the false (or the undecidable) can have real consequences.

Down the drain. For now.
 

I'm in the process of adding my films to the new films page – which you can access through the menu up there ☝️.

I'm keeping it simpler than before – nobody watches anyway.

I hope to finish soon, maybe tonight.

If you have some time, why not watch an independent film instead of YouTube?

Édouard Pons, who composed the music for Migrul, had mentioned this old piece of nonsense I had shot in one afternoon at Off Courts five years ago.

I just found it on an old hard drive and it's worse than I remembered.

At the same time, I think it's the ancestor of my web series Panic in Space which is coming out soon. In that sense, it was perhaps a necessary evil.

Yes, I know: very New Age.

But I've been noticing lately just how true it is.

When you look at how the physical and mental work together, you realize the body is kind of like the mind's notebook.

Here's the thing: thoughts are incredibly fleeting. They zip through our minds at lightning speed without leaving a trace. We think about tomorrow, lunch, a gift for mom, that sore toe... One thought leads to another, and we're just bouncing around with no real direction.

Nothing but mental chatter.

But when our brain decides an idea actually matters—something worth coming back to—it creates a bookmark. An internal sticky note that forces that thought to resurface. And it does this by linking it to an emotion.

Because emotions are physical, they stick around way longer than thoughts do. That knot in your stomach, the tight grip of stress or anxiety, the rush of fear or excitement... All of that lasts minutes, hours even.

The emotion acts like an anchor, keeping our wandering mind tethered to the same spot. The moment we try to move on, our body pipes up to remind us something's not right. The thought comes flooding back.

But sometimes it works the other way around.

When I started meditating a few years back, I realized the morning anxiety I'd been feeling was actually... stomach-related. I had this knot in my gut, and whatever worry crossed my mind would just latch onto it. Turns out the problem I was obsessing over wasn't really the problem at all.

I stopped eating before bed and the anxiety vanished.

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Related:

• Thinking Is Not The Solution
• What meditation changed for me

I'm invited on November 8th to the screening of my film about the École des Ponts at SETEC, a major engineering consultancy firm. In preparation for the debate that will follow the screening, I was asked for a copy of this engraving found in the film, which represents an "idealized" vision of the École des Ponts:

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In the film, Antoine Picon, engineer and architectural historian, provides a vibrant commentary on it, which is juxtaposed with the school's life today.

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Related links:

• "The Builders" film page (chezfilms.com)

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Lazy Sunday at home. Still feeling a bit under the weather. I took the opportunity to rewatch "The People v. O.J. Simpson". What an incredible miniseries. The writing, the direction. And Sarah Paulson is amazing in it. Brava! Bravo to everyone!

This is my 50th video since I started posting every day again and I've now reached 300 YouTube subscribers.

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On Instagram and TikTok, we're closer to 3000 followers but YouTube is harder.

To navigate this complexity, my editorial strategy rests on three essential foundations:

• blah
• blah
• blah

A strategy I could sum up with this ancient quote that guides me every day:

"Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't." – Buddha (maybe)

All this to say I'm not trying to understand. I post and we'll see what happens.

That said, I'd be lying if I said I haven't started spotting certain aspects that influence a video's success. But I don't let these ideas overshadow my goal:

Telling whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it, without hiding.

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Related:

• Insultometer
• 3 Nicolas in 1
• One video per day (again)

I regularly work from the Off Courts offices.

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I've been taking notes my whole life and it's done me practically no good. Until recently, because I changed my system.

First, let me clarify: I've been using Obsidian for 3 or 4 years (after Apple Notes, Airtable, Notion...) and even though I love this software – I'll talk more about it later – it's not a tool issue. It's a process issue.

Before, I was hoarding notes.

Like an obsessive person suffering from Diogenes syndrome: I was afraid of losing an idea, of letting the providential thought slip through my fingers. So I accumulated, and accumulated. And once in my vault, I did nothing with them.

Over time, I found technical solutions to use my notes more – mainly by putting them in front of my eyes – but that wasn't enough.

What was missing? Pressure.

The most important thing isn't writing a note: it's the work you do afterward to integrate it into a body of knowledge that you use every day. Applying pressure to a set of ideas so they aggregate and form a diamond.

So now, I proceed like this:

1. I write a note in a catch-all file (Inbox)
2. I then copy it into the relevant file (e.g.: productivity, presence, creation)
3. In this file, I group connected notes into large sections with subtitles and summaries.
4. I create (or maintain) at the top of this file a global summary in two or three sentences that captures the essence of what's important, often in the form of clear and concrete advice.
5. I rinse and repeat.

The final objective is therefore to produce this targeted advice that is immediately applicable and that I organize myself to reread regularly. Having compiled it from multiple sources makes it very personal and concrete.

That was one of this morning's activity.

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Related:

• Marketing BY Dummies (example note)
• Obsidian (website)

I've noticed that the times I got angriest were when someone acted as if I didn't exist.

As if where I stood, there was no one.

The driver who nearly runs me over. The fellow passenger who plays their music as if they were alone. The colleague who completely disregards what I say.

I've noticed it in others too. The strongest emotions arise when we feel ignored.

So much so that much of what we do seems designed to prove that we exist.

Work, conversation, creation, networking... Everything seems subconsciously calibrated to give the world proof that we're really here.

As if our essential fear was being a ghost. The existential dread of being nothing but a specter that needs to thrash about to be seen.

And when someone ignores us, it's as if they were highlighting this emptiness. As if, with a gesture or a remark, they were reducing to nothing all the efforts we make to exist everyday.

Related:

• Being yourself isn't a luxury
• The regret you can avoid on your death bed (French video)