Give away your ideas. Do it early and do it often. But what if someone steals my idea? Let them. Your reputation for creativity and generosity will precede you. Others will come to you for discussion and share their biggest and wildest ideas.
There is a way to give away your idea in exchange for reputation: it’s called publishing. You are even allowed (in the US at least) to patent same said (technical) idea for up to a year after initial publication. But if you freely give that idea to some interested party who can actually extract value, without first going through this acceptable route of publishing & publicizing, you’re just giving it away for nil. I speak from experience.
Sure, I don’t deny that there are some ideas which should be kept secret for at least some time so that you can better capitalize on them. But I think for most people this category of ideas is much smaller than they think and that it would serve them better in the long run to be less stingy with their ideas. This kind of gets to the crux of my thesis—if you have a scarcity mindset with ideas than they probably will be scarce for you. Maybe you will end up losing out on an opportunity or some concrete short-term benefit, but there are more intangible, long-term benefits to be had by being open with your ideas—the difficulty is that these benefits are inherently more nebulous/illegible and therefore easier to discount.
There is a way to give away your idea in exchange for reputation: it’s called publishing. You are even allowed (in the US at least) to patent same said (technical) idea for up to a year after initial publication. But if you freely give that idea to some interested party who can actually extract value, without first going through this acceptable route of publishing & publicizing, you’re just giving it away for nil. I speak from experience.
Sure, I don’t deny that there are some ideas which should be kept secret for at least some time so that you can better capitalize on them. But I think for most people this category of ideas is much smaller than they think and that it would serve them better in the long run to be less stingy with their ideas. This kind of gets to the crux of my thesis—if you have a scarcity mindset with ideas than they probably will be scarce for you. Maybe you will end up losing out on an opportunity or some concrete short-term benefit, but there are more intangible, long-term benefits to be had by being open with your ideas—the difficulty is that these benefits are inherently more nebulous/illegible and therefore easier to discount.