Welcome to AdSECRETS.

In this issue:

"Happy Thanksgiving"
"ANNA QUINDLEN'S COMMENCEMENT SPEECH"
"23 SIGNS THAT YOU'VE HAD TOO MUCH OF THE 90s" (continued)
"The Little Ones Know"
"Order Video/Audio tapes of Internet Marketing SuperConference at special pre-release discount"
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Support resources and back issues can be found on my websites:
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Although this is a copyrighted publication, you have permission to share it with others as long as all the information is left intact.
Support resources and back issues can be found on my website at: http://www.copycoach.com

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INTRODUCTION:
"Happy Thanksgiving":
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Although Thanksgiving is a US only holiday, I'd like to present this special issue as my personal thanks to ALL subscribers, US or not. In this issue you will find what seems to be more like entertainment than AdSecrets. Don't let that bother you. Advertising copy has everything to do with words that move people and I think you'll agree that what follows fits nicely into that category.

Thank you for your support this past year.

My Best to You,
Carl Galletti

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ARTICLE #1:
ANNA QUINDLEN'S COMMENCEMENT SPEECH
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The following was passed on to me by my good friends Eva Love and Will Noyes. I pass it on to you as a Thanksgiving gift.

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE MAY 23, 1999

I look at all of you today and I see myself 25 years ago, at my own Barnard commencement. I sometimes seem, in my mind, to have as much in common with that girl as I do with any stranger I might pass in the doorway of a Starbucks or in the aisle of an airplane. I cannot remember what she wore, or how she felt that day. I can tell you this about her without question: she was perfect.

Let me be very clear what I mean by that. I mean that I got up every day and tried to be perfect in every possible way. If there was a test to be taken, I had studied for it; if there was a paper to be written, it was done. I smiled at everyone in the dorm hallways, because it was important to be friendly, and I made fun of them behind their backs because it was important to be witty. And I worked as a residence counselor and sat on housing council and if anyone had ever stopped and asked me why I did those things? Well, I'm not sure what I would have said. And I can tell you today that I did them to be perfect, in every possible way.

Being perfect was hard work, and the hell of it was, the rules of it changed. So that while I arrived at college in 1970 with a trunk full of perfect pleated kilts and perfect monogrammed sweaters, by Christmas vacation I had another perfect uniform: overalls, turtlenecks, Doc Martens, and the perfect New York City Barnard college affectation, part hyperintellectual, part ennui. This was very hard work indeed. I had read neither Sartre nor Sappho, and the closest I ever came to being bored and above it all is falling asleep. And, finally, it was harder to become perfect because I realized, at Barnard, that I was not the smartest girl in the world. And eventually being perfect day after day, year after year, became like always carrying a backpack filled with bricks on my back. And oh, how I secretly longed to lay my burden down.

So what I wanted to say to you today is this: If this sounds, in any way, familiar to you, if you have been trying to be perfect in one way or another, too, then make today, when for a moment there are no more grades to be gotten, classmates to be met, terrain to be scouted, positioning to be arranged, make today the day to put down the backpack.

Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. And at one level it's too hard, and at another, it's too cheap and easy. Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be, and to assume the masks necessary to be the best of whatever the zeitgeist dictates, or requires. Those requirements shapeshift, sure, and when you're clever you can read them, and do the imitation required.

Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

More difficult, because there is no zeitgeist to read, no template to follow, no masks to wear. Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require. Set aside the messages this culture sends, through its advertising, its entertainment, its disdain and its disapproval, about how you should behave.

Set aside the old traditional notion of female as nurturer and male as leader; set aside, too, the new traditional notions of female as superwoman and male as oppressor. Begin with that most terrifying of all things, a clean slate. And then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: "...for me, for myself. Because those answers are who and what I am, and mean to be."

This is the hard work of your life in the world, to make it all up as you go along, to acknowledge the introvert, the clown, the artist, the reserved, the distraught, the goofball, the thinker. You will have to bend all your will not to march to the music that all of those great "theys" out there pipe on their flutes. They want you to go to professional school, to wear khakis, to pierce your navel, to bare your soul. These are the fashionable ways. The music is tinny, if you listen close enough. Look inside. That way lays dancing to the melodies spun out by your own heart. This is a symphony. All the rest are jingles.

This will always be your struggle, whether you are twenty-one or fifty-one.

I know this from experience. When I quit the New York Times to be a full time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a fulltime novelist, they said I was nuts again. I am not nuts. I am happy. I am successful on my own terms. Because if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world and it does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. Remember the words of Lily Tomlin: If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

Look at your fingers. Hold them in front of your face. Each one is crowned by an abstract design that is completely different than those of anyone in this crowd, in this country, in this world. They are a metaphor for you. Each of you are as different as your fingerprints. Why in the world should you march to any lockstep?

The lockstep is easier, and here is why you cannot march to it. Because nothing great or even good ever came of marching like everyone else. When young writers write to me about following in the footsteps of those of us who string together nouns and verbs for a living, I tell them this: every story has already been told.

Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had; herself, her own personality, her own voice. If she is doing Faulkner imitations, she can stay home. If she is giving readers what she thinks they want instead of who she is, she should stop typing.

If her books reflect her character, who she really is, then she is giving them a new and wonderful gift. Giving it to herself, too. And that is true of music and art and teaching and medicine. Someone sent me a tee shirt not long ago that read "Well Behaved Women Don't Make History." They don't make good lawyers, either, or doctors or businesswomen. Imitations are redundant.

Yourself is what is wanted. Your children, your parents, your love, husband, friends and family...all they ever wanted was a real experience of who you are....not an imitation.

You already know this. I just need to remind you. Think back. Think back to first or second grade, when you could still hear the sound of your own voice in your head, when you were too young, too unformed, too fantastic to understand that you were supposed to take on the protective coloration of the expectations of those around you. Think of what the writer Catherine Drinker Bowen once wrote, more than half a century ago: "Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty." Many a woman, too.

You are not alone in this. We parents have forgotten our way sometimes,

too. I say this as a deeply committed, often flawed mother of three. When you were first born, each of you, our great glory was in thinking you were absolutely distinct from every baby who had ever been born before. You were a miracle of singularity, and we knew it in every fiber of our being. We are only human, and being a parent is a very difficult job, more difficult than any other, because it requires the shaping of other people, which is an act of extraordinary hubris. Over the years we learned to want for you things that you did not want for yourself. We learned to want the lead in the play, the acceptance to our college, the straight and narrow path that often leads absolutely nowhere. Sometimes we wanted things because we were convinced it would make life better, or at least easier for you.

Sometimes we had a hard time distinguishing between where you ended and we began. So another reason that you must give up on being perfect and take hold of being yourself is because sometime, in the distant future, you may want to be parents, too. And if you can bring to your children the self that you truly are, as opposed to some amalgam of manners and mannerisms, expectations and fears that you have acquired as a carapace along the way, you will give them, too, a great gift. And you will teach them by example not to be terrorized by the narrow and parsimonious expectations of the world, a world that often likes to color within the lines when a spray of paint, a scrawl of crayon, is what is truly wanted.

Remember yourself, from the days when you were younger and rougher and wilder, more scrawl than straight line. Remember all of yourself, the flaws and faults as well as the many strengths. Carl Jung once said, "If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow humans better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance toward oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbors, for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures."

Most commencement speeches suggest you take up something or other: the challenge of the future, a vision of the twenty-first century. Instead I'd like you to give up. Give up the backpack. Give up the nonsensical and punishing quest for perfection that dogs too many of us through too much of our lives. It is a quest that causes us to doubt and denigrate ourselves, our true selves, our quirks and foibles and great leaps into the unknown, and that is bad enough.

This is worse: that someday, sometime, you will be somewhere, mayb on a day like today. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. And maybe something bad will have happened: you will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something you wanted to succeed at very much. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for that core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life, and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where your core ought to be.

Don't take that chance. Begin to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows that parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience. Listen to that small voice from inside you, that tells you to go another way. George Eliot wrote, "It is never too late to be what you might have been." It is never too early, either. And it will make all the difference in the world.

Take it from someone who has left the backpack full of bricks far behind, and every day feels light as a feather.

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ARTICLE #2:
"23 SIGNS THAT YOU'VE HAD TOO MUCH OF THE 90s" (Continued)
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In the last issue I had the just the first 12 of 23. Now, here is the second part (13-23) plus the first part again for the benefit of new subscribers.

"23 SIGNS THAT YOU'VE HAD TOO MUCH OF THE 90s"
1. You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.
2. You now think of three espressos as "getting wasted."
3. You haven't played solitaire with a real deck of cards in years.
4. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.
5. You call your son's beeper to let him know it's time to eat. He emails you back from his bedroom, "What's for dinner?"
6. Your daughter sells Girl Scout Cookies via her website.
7. You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven't spoken with your next door neighbor yet this year.
8. You didn't give your valentine a card this year, but you posted one for your e-mail buddies via a web page.
9. Your daughter just bought a CD of all the records your college roommate used to play.
10. You check the ingredients on a can of chicken noodle soup to see if it contains echinacea.
11. You check your blow-dryer to see if it's Y2K compliant.
12. Your grandmother clogs up your e-mail inbox, asking you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.
13. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.
14. Every commercial on television has a web-site address at the bottom of the screen.
15. You buy a computer and a week later it is out of date and now sells for half the price you paid.
16. The concept of using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase is foreign to you.
17. Cleaning up the dining room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.
18. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is that they do not have e-mail addresses.
19. You consider second-day air delivery painfully slow.
20. Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.
21. Your idea of being organized is multiple-colored Post-it notes.
22. You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.
23. You're reading this.

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For the very best books on Advertising, Marketing, Copywriting visit: http://www.twipress.com and look for the selections recommended by Carl Galletti.

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ARTICLE #3:
"The Little Ones Know"
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A kindergarten teacher was observing her classroom of children while they drew. She would occasionally walk around to see each child's artwork. As she got to one little girl who was working diligently, she asked what the drawing was.

The girl replied, "I'm drawing God."

The teacher paused and said, "but no one knows what God looks like."

Without missing a beat, or looking up from her drawing the girl replied, "They will in a minute."

Received from Michael Whalan via Eva and Will.

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"A person without a mission is like a bird without wings" -- If you expect to fly, you need to know what your life's mission is -- and follow it. Visit Dr. Mary D. Bell's website at: http://www.life-mission.com and discover your own life mission. FREE coaching session available.

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See you next issue!!! (But first, CLICK HERE-> http://www.copycoach.com/seminar).

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My Very Best to You,
Carl Galletti

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