Jack Palance: “Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit.”
Billy Crystal: ”Yeah, but what’s that one thing?”
Jack Palance: “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”
- From the movie City Slickers
Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.
You will remember from school other students preventing you from seeing their answers by placing their arm around their exercise book or exam paper. It is the same at work, people are secretive with ideas. ‘Don’t tell them that, they’ll take the credit for it.’
The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish.
Somehow the more you give away the more comes back to you. Ideas are open knowledge. Don’t claim ownership. They’re not your ideas anyway, they’re someone else’s. They are out there floating by on the ether. You just have to put yourself in a frame of mind to pick them up.
