It is a "follow the crowd" thing. Or following a recipe for a successful story. It's not a problem only of Ted talks, read or watch any commercial fiction and t

It is a "follow the crowd" thing. Or following a recipe for a successful story. It's not a problem only of Ted talks, read or watch any commercial fiction and they will bore you to death with the same story archetypes. The problem comes from trying to hedge the publishing risk: "see, if we are going to produce this talk/book/movie, we want some reassurances that is going to sell. So, you must follow this recipe." To make matters worse, there are like one recipe, the "hero journey", which is exactly what you described above.