A Secret Shared is a Burden Lifted

I'm a big fan of the PostSecret blog. I love it not only because it's fascinating and lurid, but because it's a brilliant, simple idea. Frank Warren put up an ad asking people to send in their anonymous secrets on postcards. He asks senders to be brief, legible, and creative, and to put only one secret per card. The website has become a huge hit, getting more than 3 million visitors a month. He's also recently published the book PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives.

PostSecret is one of those ideas I wish I had thought of. I imagined this guy to be getting rich and famous essentially by getting his audience to create his content. It wasn't until I was at the lecture that I realized that his website is almost completely without commercial advertisement--the promotional space is mostly dedicated to the non-profit National Hopeline Network, a suicide-prevention center.

This guy isn't doing it for the money. That became abundantly clear during his talk. He said he has received more than 40,000 pieces of mail since he started this project two years ago. This is what he says he's learned:

• Courage is more important than talent or experience when making art. He believes we all have the capacity in us to make great art.
• Our country's media is obsessively focused on homicide, but there are twice as many suicides per year as homicides.
• The most common theme in the secrets he sees is loneliness.
• Commerce mitigates, censors, and shapes almost all of our communication these days. This is why he doesn't have ads on his site.
• Those things that make us feel abnormal are actually what make us the same.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about his talk is that I learned that the address on the site (and printed on the cover of the book) is his home address. He frequently has strangers come to his door, he said, and he's never had a negative experience.

I find his faith in humanity amazing in this day of security and paranoia. I'm so glad PostSecret was his idea and not mine. I doubt I could have made it as wonderful.