PostSecret

PostSecret started life as a blog on which Frank Warren shared images of home-made postcards on which people wrote their secrets and mailed them to him anonymously. The postcards are often highly personalised and decorative. The secrets they share vary, in Warren’s own words: ‘from the shocking, to the silly, to the soulful… The secrets I receive reflect the full spectrum of complicated issues that many of us struggle with every day: Intimacy, trust, meaning, humour, and desire.”

PostSecret started in November when Warren had the wild idea to print 3,000 self-addressed postcards. The postcards were blank on one side – on the other side were a set of simple instructions: he asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they’d never told anyone before. And he handed them out on the streets of Washington D.C, unsure what would come of it.The response was very moving:  the idea began to spread virally and people began to create their own postcards to send in. Warren has now received over half a million secrets. Every Sunday, the PostSecret blog is updated with his pick of the best secrets he receives that week.

In this awesome and inspiring TED talk, Warren shares the development of PostSecret, as well as a selection of some of the most moving or entertaining secrets he has received, all of which showcase the potential of anonymous secret sharing. PostSecret has now developed into an 80,000-strong online community, where readers gather together to share their thoughts on the latest secrets.

 

SuperBetter

SuperBetter, according to its own wiki, “is a game that can help you improve your health, motivation, wellbeing, and ultimately your life!”

 

“SuperBetter is a tool created by game designers and backed by science to help build personal resilience: the ability to stay strong, motivated and optimistic even in the face of difficulty challenges.”

As readers of yesterday’s post will already know, SuperBetter was designed by Jane McGonigal. Jane is a game designer, who specialises in pervasive gaming and alternate reality games. When she was faced with serious health problems as the result of a concussion, Jane decided to take action by turning her own existence into a game, where the objective was to recover her health. To do this she recruited allies (the support of her close friends and family), engaged power-ups (actions she could take to boost her resilience) and battled villains (took steps to overcome the things that triggered her symptoms).

Why did she do this? In her words, “I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game… we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination and more optimism and we’re more likely to reach out to others for help. And I wanted to bring these traits to my real-life challenge.” 

The results were very positive and Jane began to recover successfully. But what happened next surprised her. In blog posts online, she put some instructions on how to play the game she had designed and named it “SuperBetter”. Very soon, she began to hear from people from all over the world who had begun using the game to overcome their own real-life problems and were experiencing similarly remarkable results.

These results were, Jane discovered, due to something called post-traumatic growth. The opposite of post-traumatic stress, post-traumatic growth occurs when one uses a traumatic experience as a metaphorical springboard to create better things in your life. And Jane’s game had triggered this  response in everybody who played it.

SuperBetter now exists as an online site, where you can register, state your objective and begin working to achieve it by transforming your life into a game. Objectives can vary from overcoming serious health problems to simply losing weight or getting fitter. You get to choose your own quests, battle the villains and activate the power-ups. SuperBetter is backed by scientific research and provides a highly social environment. Read it’s About page by clicking the link.

Awesome!