What is the best advice your mother ever gave you?

[Sighing intensely]

"Listen, son. I don't know why you are so bad at math and physics, why you are one of the worst at Latin and Greek and for what reason you have the lowest grades in history. But I can help you understand why your essays are so terrible. The fact is, you do not pay attention to your reader. When you start writing, do visualize a reader: a friend or a relative of ours, the Prime Minister or whoever you want, and focus on the idea that you are addressing your words and your thoughts directly to them. Do pay attention to your reader and you will be rewarded by their attention and gratitude."

I know that a Nobel Prize for Literature in my hands would be, at this point, a terrific ending to this story. Well, unfortunately, this is not exactly the case.

Nonetheless, there are a few things I achieved thanks to my mother's enlightening input.

At the next test, my essay got the highest grade. As I had figured out that I was writing a letter to a popular Italian comedian, it resulted utterly funny. I'm certain about this because when my teacher of Italian literature decided to read it aloud to the classroom, they were all laughing all the time, astonished at the idea that the worst student ever had managed to write that.

All of a sudden, I had discovered the use of humour, irony and sarcasm. I had understood that I could fill my writings with anecdotes, metaphors, allegories and other rhetoric figures that I thought could exist only in classic literature.

From that moment on, all my essays proved successful. Besides, thanks to a newly found self-confidence, I saw an overall improvement in all classes, and things went pretty well until the end of my studies.

One day, some ten years after my mother's precious advice, I found a kind of weird job offer in "La Nazione", Florence's main newspaper. They were looking for a "talented, creative person, gifted with a peculiar predisposition towards writing". I sent them a three-page letter where I poked fun at them from the first sentence to the last word, managing to stay in balance between mockery and derision. That was the first time that I had applied for a job, and it proved to be the last one as well. Out of more than two hundred letters, they chose mine and, as they were an advertising agency, they hired me as an assistant copywriter.

Thanks to my mom, I had found my career.

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