Great thought may not be a secret

Jason Kolb is a wise thinker. I often read his blog and today there is a wise quote that hits my heart. I have to share it with the readers of Thinking Space.

Don't worry about keeping your great idea a secret, if it's good enough you will have to beat people over the head with it.

Many times, I hear people saying that they want to keep their "brilliant" idea as secret so that no one else may steal it before they figure out how to make profit from the idea by themselves. Actually, an idea could not really be brilliant if somebody else may steal it by just hearing it once. In the other words, great idea never needs to be a secret because nobody can steal it without intensive thinking.

I was authoring about human mind in the past few days and so I have thought much about human mind. Human mind is such a beautiful thing that sharing only improves its quality. At the same time, mind embodiment is so difficult that nobody can do it well if the embodied mind is brilliant, i.e., with high quality. Without a well embodiment, how could a person steal a mind from another's brain? Speaking is simply not good enough for embodying a brilliant mind. Therefore, we may have only one conclusion. If somebody says that his "brilliant" mind is stolen by discussing it with another person, it only tells that the shared mind is actually shallow and inferior.

Jason said that he had many experiences of how sharing improves his mind, and so do I. I have authored many novel thoughts in this blog (Thinking Space) and I have never worried that somebody may steal them from me. There could be three consequences. One is that the reader cannot understand, and hence the idea is safe from being stolen. The second is that the reader reads and takes it, and hence the idea is shallow (I do not lose anything from a shallow thought). The last is that the reader reads and thinks and takes it. At this situation, the readers must have thought of this issue before and most often they have thought even more than what I have authored. Otherwise, it is impossible for them to grasp the spirit of a real brilliant thought. Hence to the end I still does not lose much, if I lose something. In any other cases, people must get to touch with me to consult about the thoughts because actually nobody can steal brilliant ideas.

I have just authored two posts about "we are in a new transition" in which I have discussed a phenomenon that mind is substituting the position of capital in our society. When I wrote the articles, I noticed that there is a fundamental difference between capital asset and mind asset. When someone shares capital asset, the amount of his asset decreases. It is similar to that if one has only a cup of water, the more he shares the less water in his own cup. By contrast, however, when one shares mind asset, the value of his asset will not decrease but often increase instead. It is like that if one has a can of air, the larger room he gets the greater space his air can fill.

I believe that this is why we often says that it is a beautiful mind.