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This is a remarkably common meme. Let me share a bit of Battlebots history - perhaps it will help. Back when Battlebots was a going thing, they would have a competition which started on Tuesday (preliminaries) and ran through Sunday (finals). One could generalize about the teams as two types, people who shared information and people who didn't. A common theme amongst the people who didn't share information was that they didn't want competitors "stealing their ideas, or developing counter measures before the match." They would go to great lengths to "hide" things (covering their robots, not talking about them, etc) and they would invariably lose. (in the 3 years we went I don't think a single "secret" team moved into the finals) Information sharers on the other hand were communicative almost to a fault, they would tell you EVERYTHING about their creation, how long it took to build, why they think it could win, what they thought was key in various fights, etc, etc. Curiously, they often won their matches. Spotting this trend early in my Battlebots 'career' I sought to understand the mechanism behind it. The answer turned out to be ideas in a vacuum suck. (pun intended) Basically any idea, no matter how great, when it comes from an individual without anyone else thinking about it, there are going to be all sorts of problems with it. Because everyone thinks about things a bit differently, by saying "Hey, I've got this idea, what do you think?" you gather alternative points of view which always shed more light on the idea than you had originally. Can that douse your passion? Sure. But it can inflame it too. I wondered about 'stealing' as well, if these folks are giving away their ideas why aren't they being stolen left and right? The insight there was that people who can execute on ideas, well they have a bazillion already, more often than not their problem is choosing rather than coming up with something. They don't steal ideas because if they did they wouldn't have time to get to it for a while and by then you probably already did it. The folks who don't have any ideas of their own, they generally can't execute for squat, further, not being someone who could develop the idea in the first place, and thus not being able to 'grow' it as you would be sharing it and listening to the feedback, they can't pull it off either. So where does that leave us? The old saw that ideas are a dime a dozen? Ideas are seeds, they are not process. For all the ideas I've seen go from conception to production, the actual idea part was not a statistically significant part of executing on it. Some didn't emerge as recognizable from the original concept. So generally, worrying about someone stealing your idea is overrated, worrying that you aren't up to the task of executing on your own idea, that is worth worrying about. |
Freddie was, by most accounts, paranoid - he was an incredibly talented musician but he was always afraid someone was trying to steal his material. People say he even played with a handkerchief over his fingers to conceal the notes he was playing. Because of this, the people that do remember him remember him as the guy who turned down the offer to be the first ever recorded jazz artist.
The Victor Talking Machine Company (makers of the Victrola) then made the offer to The Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
The record sold a million copies... in 1917.