Nobody is going to steal your idea

Every builder knows the thought: my idea is so good I can’t tell anyone, because someone will steal it, execute it, and get rich on what was mine ▸ 21:52. It feels like prudence. It’s ego wearing a disguise.

The da Vinci counterexample

I’ve always been a Leonardo da Vinci fan: so many ideas that, had they landed in their time, we’d be living in the 27th century ▸ 22:19. But he had this exact fear. He encrypted his notebooks, hid his designs, guarded everything ▸ 22:42. And what did the secrecy buy? The helicopter got reinvented three hundred years later, owing nothing to his drawings ▸ 23:04. For the world, it was as if the ideas had never existed. He protected them so well they died.

nadie te la va a robar, tranquilo →

The colder truth

Here’s the part that stings more than theft: if you’re not influential and not rich, most people don’t care about your idea at all ▸ 23:21. Without credentials that signal “this person knows,” an idea from nowhere gets a like and a scroll. We live buried in daily content and spam; nobody stops to think about your idea, and far fewer would stop to build it, which is the actually hard part ▸ 24:09.

My brother has a razor for this, and I don’t love admitting he might be right: the idea is worth nothing; the execution is worth everything ▸ 24:37. I’m not sure it’s 100% true. Some days it feels exactly true.

The teaching

Secrecy has a price you pay every day: no feedback, no collaborators, no compounding. Theft has a price you’ll almost certainly never pay. Da Vinci chose secrecy and the world lost centuries. This whole channel, and this archive, is us choosing the opposite bet…