Alain de Botton: Film-making is not for people-pleaser

Alan de Botton is a Swiss-born British writer who has authored several international bestsellers such as The Art of Travel, On Love, How Proust can Change Your Life. He also created the online school School of Life, which is also a Youtube Channel. But before de Botton became an author, he wanted to be a film director. And yet his self-knowledge, coupled with the insights into the qualities that a film director demands, made him eventually realise that film-making is not the best arena to wield his talents:

¨I am a people pleaser. i am not very good at upsetting people. and film-making often requires you to have an incredibly powerful vision and a way of upsetting, manipulating a lot of people around you to make them accept your vision. I couldn´t do the two. I have a strong vision, but I want to keep other people happy. Writing seems a much better way, because you can do it alone. You don´t have to persuade people. "

But de Button returned to his early vision of being a filmmaker after having established himself as an writer. And this time, he was able to make films in a way that suits his nature:

¨Much later, I started a Youtube Channel (School of Life), and I made little film every week. The great thing about it is that I hardly need to ask anyone. It is a more pure form of what I was looking for when I was 18. At 18, I have tried to make short films but just could never persuade the cameraman to do the things that he wanted to do¨

In short, de Botton has an acuity of a career consultant that informs him of the implicit rules within a discipline, and whether his character would fit into that discipline. When he realised that his character cannot sustain his adolescent dream of becoming a film director, he respected his disposition towards being a lone creator, so he found an art form that was convenient to the way he was used to doing things -- the writing. Later on, with an awareness that the form matters more than the content, he returned to his film-making dream, except this time resorting to a form of making films that is in par with his natural being.

Complementing this reading with Alain de Botton´s confession on why he quitted Harvard, and academia is not the utopia for curious minds.