Lying true.

We give far too little importance to context. Take a flower. Picture it in a meadow, then on a gravestone, then behind glass in a museum. It's the same flower, the same petals, the same colour, and yet it does something completely different to you each time. Nothing about the flower has changed. Everything around it has. I've come to believe that the background often matters more than the thing itself, and that most of the work we call "storytelling" is really just taking that seriously.

Musicians know this better than anyone. A lot of artists say that if they had put one of their hits somewhere else on the album, it wouldn't have worked the same way. Same song, same notes, different place, different effect. The same goes for the date it came out, and for a whole list of things that have nothing to do with the work itself. A product is no different. What comes before it, what it's placed next to, the moment it arrives in someone's life: none of that is decoration around the product. It is part of the product.

It also works the other way around. Sometimes an artist you love releases a track that has nothing to do with the rest of their work. You're not sure you like it, or you flat out hate it. And yet you can't stop listening. Then at some point something clicks in your head, you start connecting this new track to everything else they've made, and sometimes it ends up being one of your favourites. The opposite is true too: the track you adore the day it comes out is often the one you get tired of first.

Ideas behave exactly the same way. Some of them arrive with no context to put them in, and those are usually the embarrassing ones; you don't know what to do with them. But the ideas that fit our expectations the least are, most of the time, the most innovative, precisely because they have no context. A truly new idea doesn't find its place. It creates its own. So when an idea puts you off straight away, it's worth asking why. It might be the one that changes everything.

And a story is something you play with. Creating is a serious thing, but it's a serious thing you have to play at.

An author is nothing more than a child emptying a box of crayons on the floor, looking for the perfect colour to draw the sky.

Take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously. Seriousness puts a weight on the work; it represses the playful part, and play is where there are no stakes and no limits. That's the state in which ideas show up most often. So make a mess, accept chance, don't tidy up between two ideas. A child goes from one game to the next without putting the last one away. That's how we imagine.

The dilemma of sincerity

Today we always want to prove everything. We want every single thing to be absolutely true, and we leave no room for feeling, or for dreaming. Sincerity has become a kind of goal, and it's a strange one: it's blurry, and the harder we try to reach it, the further away it seems to get. In art, sincerity is not the first objective. We all like to think of ourselves as coherent, rational beings. And yet, paradoxically, someone with no contradictions at all comes across as not very authentic.

Montaigne understood this more than four hundred years ago. He spent twenty years writing about himself, and the more he wrote, the less he looked like a single, finished person. He changes his mind from one chapter to the next, contradicts himself, admits it, and doesn't correct a thing. He wasn't trying to give a fixed portrait of who he was. He was trying to capture someone in motion. That's exactly why, centuries later, he still feels more alive than most people we meet.

I do not portray being. I portray passing.

The truest sides of us often come out of stories that are false, or arranged. That's what creating gives us access to. The work says who we are, no matter how we got there. A poem can express what no technical explanation ever will. A piece of music can make you feel courage, or energy, that no rational argument could have given you. In that sense, all art is poetry. Anything that gives people access to your vision of the world is right, even if the information is false.

Aragon had a name for it: le mentir-vrai, lying true. In the short story of the same name, he goes back to his own childhood and openly mixes memories with invention, because the invented parts say something about him that the facts alone couldn't. For him, that wasn't a betrayal of the truth. It was the only way to reach it. I find that idea incredibly freeing. It means a story doesn't need to be a perfect record to be honest. It needs to be faithful to what you saw, and to what you want others to see.

In product, that idea makes people uncomfortable, and I understand why. But it isn't about the numbers. It's about the story around them. When I explain why a product should exist, I'm not delivering a report. I'm trying to make someone see what I see, and feel why it matters, before it exists. A list of features can be perfectly accurate and say nothing at all. A story, sometimes a little arranged, sometimes simplified to the point of being unfair to the details, can carry the whole idea in a few sentences. The first one is true. The second one is right.

So I've stopped trying to make every story bulletproof. I try to make it land. Choose the meadow, the gravestone or the museum on purpose. Decide where the song goes on the album. Play with it. And accept that the version that makes people understand will rarely be the most literal one.