"This I Believe" Essay: Eric LeReste

This I Believe...

A few weeks ago, we ran out of ideas. No scoops. No great stories to broadcast. Deadlines killing us. Dangerous for a weekly TV show.

A special meeting was a must. 30 gigantic egos together in a small room, for a brain-light-storm session of 3 hours. No food. No drinks. Cause you know... budget cuts!

I know them all and I love them all. With our fears as deep as our courage, our doubts as overwhelming as our certitudes and our luminosity, as mesmerizing as our shadows. 30 lovely egos. And a recipe for disaster, under normal conditions, our coming together requires a military strategy to avoid the War of the Worlds. And then the thought came to declare any idea that would be presented as being already brilliant. Since the imperative was not to conclude on the ideas, but to receive new ones, brilliance was welcomed for the light-storm of the day.

And so it was. Every time someone shared a thought, we all responded with amusement, a stretched ego and often with a new sincerity, that it was brilliant! It was one of the best meetings we had over the last few years, and the ideas danced in our minds like a symphonic ballet of lighting bugs. No clash, no crash, but a great match.


OK, almost none of the ideas made it on air, but this meeting changed something deeper at the roots of this wild tree of egos. They didn't notice, but during the following weeks, our regular meetings kept that brilliance, and this year-end party was an incredible blast, which they all felt with deeply in their heart.

It seems to me as if the fears, the doubts and the darkness reconciled themselves with the certitudes, the strength and the light. Of course, they cannot be separated completely, but they can learn to live together for a while.

We're still running out of ideas and scoops, but to a certain extent, we strengthened something fundamental in the fabric of human dignity, something I truly believe in; harmony!