I'd heard about Frank Warren's PostSecret project for years, and today (inspired by a tweet) I finally took a look. More links below!

The problem for me is the basic guideline for participating: Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. 

Frustratingly, I won't be able to send one until I get a profound new secret and remember to tell PostSecret first. (If you look at the ones people send in: following Frank's guideline makes them tend towards the profound.) I can't think of any secret that I haven't told at least ONE other person, and usually more. I attribute this to the combination of (1) being less self aware than average ("It comes to me by freight," is the way I explain this, using an old shipping term) and (2) having spent the Thursday nights of my teenage years in a Carl-Rogers style encounter group. (Yes in California; why do you ask?) In other words, whenever I figure something out I immediately want to share. Living in New England for almost 20 years made me a bit more reticent, following local custom, but every hard-won secret of mine is known by somebody.

Guy Kawasaki asks Frank Warren 10 Questions

Seemingly there are only nine questions in this particular version of Guy's standard interview, and the answer to the ninth is, "We all carry a secret that would break your heart if you just knew what it was..."

So I guess I have work to do finding out mine.

Meanwhile, the most interesting part of the site for me is

Are all 500,000 secrets true?

This relates to an interesting discussion that used to (and perhaps still does) take place in the Letters column of our own Cary Tennis' Since You Asked, as to whether some particular Letter Writer is "real". Quick answer: that is the wrong question! I discussed this and other matters in a 2007 conference paper published on this page. In the paper I write about the subjects of collaboration and fun and authenticity that have obsessed me all my life, but I had to frame them in a wrapper that would attach them to the conference and you may not want to wade through it. The best part is the footnotes, which I have recently updated here.

Speaking of obsession, one of my correspondents always ends her e-mails with this quotation:

"If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber."  -- John P. Marquand

Um, not the gas chamber, but I think the first sentence is true for me. And if you'd like a snazzy quotation (mostly about writing) to use in your own signatures, you are invited to check out my old sig-o-matic.