It’s easy to think that your ideas are to be tightly controlled so that no one “steals” them, but that’s almost never the case. I shared a few years ago that almost every NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) that I’ve signed has been unnecessary. I’m happy to sign them to appease the other party, but they’re not needed, as knowing an idea is miles away from actually making it happen.
In that post I shared thoughts from Austin Netzley:
“To achieve big success, it’s not about ideas or information. It’s about implementation and execution.“
and from Howard Aiken:
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
This also came up in the book “Masters of Doom“, the story of John Carmack and John Romero and their creation of the legendary video game “Doom”. From the book:
“All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea — it just seems so fundamentally wrong.”
And then in a recent podcast episode, Gary Vaynerchuk took it a bit further, saying:
“There’s no copying. There’s execution. I promise whatever anyone who’s watching right now thinks somebody copied them on something, you copied someone else. So I don’t need that.”
I’m not condoning that you steal from others, but ideas often aren’t anything amazing. For example, our website design/build process has been honed over the years and works amazingly well, but it’s not all that unique — it’s our execution of it that makes it work so well.
I spend a lot of time looking for new ideas, but almost all of them involve learning from others. Share what you know so we can all improve, but the real power comes from executing better than anyone else ever has.
