Secrets For All to See

“Secrets can take many forms. They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we’ll never meet,” says Frank Warren, creator of Post Secret. This experiment started in New York when he handed out self-addressed postcards to strangers and asked them to write a secret and mail it to him, so he could post them on his Post Secret blog. Since then, the idea has spread wildly. Every day, he receives artful homemade postcards from all over the world containing secrets that have never been told to anyone else. Currently, he has collected and posted over 500,000 secrets! These secrets help people to deal with the pain in their lives by sharing the secret with the world, and to connect with others through the knowledge that they are not alone. Warren says that, “It was through crowdsourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me.” The beauty of this project lays in the fact that people can share their secrets anonymously to share their grief, pain, or laughter with the world. This sharing with others is one of the traits that unites the world as one, as humanity, because we can take part in the emotions of others. As Warren says, “Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now.”  The sharing of secrets helps to build strong relationships with others, such as in the case of best friends, who share all their secrets with one another. Recently in English class, everyone wrote down a secret on a note card, and after we exchanged them, we wrote poems about the secret we received. While many of these secrets were silly, they helped to connect us to each other by sharing a part of our lives with one another. In their own way, secrets are little stories that connect us to others and make us human.

          Of all the TED Talks I have watched and reflected on, Warren’s presentation style is the one that I want to emulate during my speech. His use of stories was ASTOUNDING (go watch it, I can’t even describe how amazing it was!). By sharing a few of the different secretsthat he has received, some bitter and some sweet, he captivated his audience like none other. For example, when he read, “I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. I never did have someone,” the audience was dead silent (as in, hear a pin drop silent), and riveted to what he was saying. Then he merely showed an image (see up right) of one of the postcards he received, and the audience burst into laughter. This comedic relief helped to lighten the mood. His perfect blend of secrets that told stories, an insightful speech, and interesting images captured his audience (myself included) and helped to communicate his point. Because of his story-telling method, everybody in the audience was able to personally connect to his speech, which is what I will make the goal of my TED Talk presentation style.


Image: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/frank_warren_half_a_million_secrets.html