There’s no copying, there’s just execution

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.”