(Why) sharing your know-how does not hurt you

It’s not uncommon that when someone learns about something new, he or she is not willing to share his or her knowledge. If everyone knew about it and acted on it, it would be too common knowledge, strategy or whatever else to actually work anymore. And you wouldn’t have an edge anymore. Because now everyone knows about it and everyone uses the knowledge.

Or a company is not willing to say how it does things. Being afraid that they will be copied and this copycat starts to hurt you. Taking away your advantage.

There are exceptions of course, but I would say that these worries are all crap. Sharing your knowledge only makes other people smarter and it’s easier to deal with smart people than with stupid ones. Yes, I honestly believe that. I think every professional poker player can tell you that while it’s often easy to take money off the amateurs, it’s usually difficult to predict them. Because, in simple words, they are stupid in poker. Thus they do nonsense moves with nonsense hands and it’s difficult to understand for the pro’s. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean the amateurs are winners against pro’s, all I am saying is that it’s more difficult to read or understand them sometimes. And same goes to business people – the more your competitor knows, the smarter he is, the easier it is for you to guess what is doing or what he will be doing.

That’s one thing. However, totally different point I’d like to bring out is that you can share your knowledge individually in one on one sessions, you can write a book or get a movie done about it, but it never means that now everyone knows about it and now everyone will act based on the knowledge.

The first obstacle here is that while you might tell everything as straightforward as possible, people will still understand things differently. Secondly, while learning new theories, people often tend to add their own mind to it, thus creating something totally different from the original product. Thirdly, a great number of people will possibly not agree with you, thus are again no threat. Fourthly, they might agree theoretically, but in reality they are not believing what you are saying. And finally – people might learn your knowledge, people might understand it, believe in it. But even of those people who do understand and believe the know-how you’re sharing, only a % or 2 will actually take action based on the knowledge.

I think it’s easy to understand it once you start thinking about it. Even if you take this one fact that there’s thousands of know-hows available on the same topic. And many just forget about them all. But sharing your know’how does have its advantage – it gives exposure to you and your name, maybe also your company name. And that’s never bad, if thanks to your shared know-how people start to look at you as an expert.

Here’s one example of how one know-how or one know-what might affect the society in general. Or to be more exact – how it does not affect. Take the movie, „The Secret” which claims they will be sharing the world’s biggest secret with you – YOU CAN BE ANYONE OR ANYTHING YOU WANT TO, YOU JUST NEED TO PUT YOUR MIND TO IT! Well, that’s a secret right in my arse. I believe that if you are reading this blog you already know that. Not that you’re in my arse, but that the generaly theory is correct. And noone needs to tell you that secret anymore. But the movie might have given some more thinking material. Or you could use the movie to structure your thoughts about it all a bit better. Don’t take it word by word though, some parts of it are rather funny or annoying or ...whatever else.

Just to show you the five things that were brought out above, the five things why you shouldn’t worry about the effects of sharing your know-how, based on this movie.

1. (people understand your story differently than it was meant) – I think many people remembered only one part of the movie. The part where the coma patient (okay, just disabled for life) thought himself healthy. That’s the part that many will remember. And they say their relative really wanted to get better as well, but they still died. Whatever, but my point is, this was NOT the point of the movie. Thus people understood the point of the movie differently.

2. (people add their own mind to it, thus creating a new and different know-how) – the movie talked about the waves of the universe and so on. While I had this structured in my head way before I accidentially saw the movie, I’d say the secret they shared in the movie was – „Believe in things. Want to buy a plane? If you don’t believe you can do it, you’ll never make it. If you do believe you can do it, you might not make it, but there’s a 100% better chance that you will than for the other guy who doesn’t believe he can make it. ” – why? I’ll come to that later in my blog. But right now I just wanted to show that there are similarities, but your own mind creates something else from the initial product.

3. (great number of people will not agree with you) – many people hate this sort of self-help stuff. Well, I hate it too but not that much. Even though the points are correct, they are often made like „I will teach you to live” and ... well, I hate that, they don’t, they often just speak of the known truth and ask for a payment. Well, one way or another, usually those who hate this kind of stuff will never even see the movie. Or if they do, most of the time they are chatting with their mates about „what the fuck is going on there, brooo?” (okay, that might have been an example from some IQ 40 guys but you get the point).

4. (they agree but do not believe) – they agree that the movie has good points, they agree that it *might* be possible to help yourself just by believing in yourself, but they are sure that it’s just a nice illusion that might work only for some people. Not them. Thus they don’t even try.

5. (they believe, they agree, they understand, but they do not act on it) – past experience is a strong influence. The way you have been doing things in the past...well, it’s really difficult to change that. Or sometimes, even to want to change that. That’s one reason why people might not act on it. They might just not have the will power. They go on with another self-help movie and just get the enjoyment from watching those movies, not taking advantage of them for longer term.

Your know-how. Not always, but usually you can share it without any negative consequences. And if the know-how was not learned from some other book but rather worked out all by yourself. Then even if something should get screwed, even if all of your competitors start to copy it, think who they are copying from! It’s you! You, the one who came up with the know-how in the first place. And if you managed to do it once, there’s a great chance you can do always do it once again and then again if needed. This means you’re always one step ahead; you will always be one step ahead if you’re able to come up with new ideas every so often.