Damien Soitout
A life-change profile is a document with a date. Read the 31 May 2022 PresseLib account once, as the paper's account.
A long profile is a document you read with the date still attached, not a life you carry into every later page.
On 31 May 2022, at 18:03, PresseLib published a long profile of me under the kicker Changer de vie. The headline that follows calls it an initiatory journey from the Sierra Madre to the hills of the Gers. I am writing this on 2 June, while that text is still the text of 31 May. The page was built to be updated, and a later update is not part of what I am using today. If you open the PresseLib piece in some future month, read the date under the title before you treat a sentence as the sentence I am talking about here.
A life-change profile is a particular kind of article. It is not a results note and it is not a book review. It asks a person to tell how a pace broke, and then it arranges the answers into a story with a before and an after. The before is almost always louder. The after is almost always a kitchen, a road, or a room with a window. Readers like that shape because they are tired. The shape is allowed. It is still a document. It has a newsroom, a clock time, and a limit. Later pieces of writing, including mine, do not get to mine it for fresh confession. You read it once, as the paper's account, and you learn the method from the reading.
The method is the part that travels. Anyone who meets a life-change profile, of a founder, a doctor, an athlete, or a neighbor, can do what I am doing with this one. Keep the date. Keep the attributions. Notice what the paper chose to make the hinge. Do not spread the private sentences into every later conversation as if they had just been discovered. I am the person in the piece, so I will walk through what it actually records. I will not add a scene the reporters did not print.
If you want the public frame I maintain myself, it sits on the biography, and the interviews already given sit on the press page. An earlier conversation, the Radio Sinaloa interview, is a different document with a different date. Do not blend them into one myth. Reporters Without Borders is right that protecting journalists protects your right to information. The right includes the right to know which morning the information came from. The Committee to Protect Journalists has defended that work for decades. A profile is that work. Treat it as work.
The piece quotes me on the start. I passed a baccalaureat in economic and social studies at Redon, with no clear idea of what came next. A discovery internship at Yves Rocher was the accident that became a job. They had a server maintenance problem that had cost them money for four years. It was simple once seen. I proposed a solution. Three months later the problem was solved, and they offered me three months as a consultant. That is the paper's account of the first door, in my words as they printed them.
At twenty, the paper says, I flew to the United States, near Washington, to study, housed by a family in exchange for a few tasks. The family were entrepreneurs. I showed them a problem from another angle, and they helped me into a master's in business administration. With students from that class I created Gyo Translation, a translation firm the paper describes as working well. On the campus I met the woman who would become my wife. The paper does not give her a name. A life-change profile is not a form you complete by filling in people the reporter left out.
From there the account moves to Mexico. The paper says I taught business economy and English at a private university, and that I built a second company, bringing in consultants from abroad to change the culture inside Mexican firms. In 2014 I came back for a few months to the Gers, where I had spent most school holidays with my mother's family, unsure whether Mexico was the right place. I worked with the Cave des producteurs reunis de Nogaro and opened a Latin American market. I met an American who thought Floc de Gascogne was remarkable and wanted to do something with it. We founded the CPF group, in import and export of wines and spirits. The group, the paper says, then became an investment fund based in Miami and widened its consulting toward large companies and public institutions. Notoriety followed. That paragraph is the paper's compression of several years. Compression is the form. A profile is not a ledger, and reading it as one will make you invent entries the reporters never checked.
The hinge is a quote the paper sets apart. For six years I did not take a holiday. I did not see my eldest daughter grow up. I was on the radio and on television. I did not have a free weekend. Then Covid came, and we worked like mad for hospitals. I began to tire, and to say that it was enough. It became harder when disagreements appeared between the associates. That is the paper's sentence. I am leaving it as a sentence about fatigue and a split, not as a quarrel I am retrying here.
The group, the paper says, then divided the companies. I kept the consulting, the pharmaceutical activity, and the import and export of wines and spirits, which I told the reporter were the parts that take the most time. I got out from under the daily responsibility by naming a trusted collaborator as chief executive, and I published 100 Hours, a book the paper describes as an invitation to look inward before trying to improve a life. The desk split is an organization fact. I will talk about what an owner keeps and what a chief executive takes as its own subject, for any firm. It does not need a second telling of the family sentences inside it.
Read that hinge the way you would read any hinge in a life-change profile. Ask what changed in the calendar, not what the adjectives want you to feel. The calendar change in the piece is simple. A man who had not taken a holiday in six years stopped treating motion as a personality. The companies did not vanish. A collaborator took the daily chair. A book came out. If you are reading the piece for yourself, the transferable part is the holiday and the chair, not the skyline the paper uses as contrast.
The after is also a quote. For a long time I enjoyed the business world. Then I did not want the stress. We took a few weeks to see my family in France. We arrived by surprise on my mother's birthday, and we did not leave again. We settled at the end of July 2021. I told the paper it was, for me, the best village in the world, full of people of different nationalities who each have a story, and of people who do not care about yachts and private jets and who ask only to be left in peace. The paper says I was 31, consulting through Solution Succes, and watching three daughters grow, the youngest then five months old, beside my wife, who was learning to like what the paper calls real life.
Those sentences stay inside this reading. They are the paper's account of a household on 31 May 2022. They are not a template, and they are not a set of facts for me to decorate later with new names, new ages, or a new explanation of who met whom. A reader who wants them can read them where they were printed, once. A reader who wants a method can take this: a life-change profile will always offer you a village, a child, or a window. The offer is the paper's. Your job is to notice the decision underneath the scenery. The decision here was to stop a pace that had already eaten the holidays.
Passion is the word people reach for when they read an after like that. I do not think the word survives contact with the date. Read the profile once. Keep the date. Leave the rest where the paper put it.
