Throughout life I've heard that sharing is caring. And as any life noob, I thought, yeah, it must be true if it is repeated so many times. But I feel the context it's said in has to be specified. We all are guilty of over sharing. Sometimes we share something to get information about the topic, other times we do this for the sheer joy of sharing like the communal monkeys that we are.

I've been guilty of doing both but the most regrets come from former though the percentage of those events(not the day to discuss them, someday for sure) are far less than latter. These bad experiences inspire to wrote post like this, it makes you wonder if you should share anything with others at all, after all, you had the idea so you must get the outcome of it, right? That's tricky, this is based on assumption that you were the only person with that idea, which is highly unlikely, there's only so many permutations of realistic ideas people with limited experiences can have. Vast majority of ideas are shit™ anyways. There's one more assumption, we believe our idea was stolen by the people we discussed whereas the reality might be they were working on something similar or your sharing with them just helped them pursue the idea harder. Some derivative of self fulfilling prophecy, if you may. If assumption one is true, we can't do anything about it, tbh, if I consider internet as a bias inducing entity, in a way, I got/stole some idea from some work, which was highly unlikely in early 20th century , we still have examples of people who had no knowledge of people who were working on the same thing they were working on.(look up TV/phone/plane invention stories, there's a cool National Geographic docu-series too)

Now for the latter assumption, you can very well control this. And I do see contradictory advice's about this from time to time. For example, YC's Sam Aktman has startup talk where it's said sharing your ideas in early stages of your startup is a good thing, the justification for this is, if your idea sounds bad but its actually good, people won't copy it. So I think it's to look for different answers. If people think your idea is cool, don't do it.(I hope I got that right ) This is contradictory to what I see in actual world, l see startups in stealth™ mode, I mean, aren't you supposed to be do- sharing is caring? Perhaps this is because of my latter case- where ideas get stolen which very well might be a key I sight for a new market. So the best strategy seems to be to keep your head down and work on it, this may not allow me to get that feedback loop, which can be same as throwing darts in dark, can be a deal breaker for bootstrapping , for those who have time and money, this seems to be working fine.

So sharing or no sharing. Despite all the cons of sharing, I still think you need to share, perhaps like a researcher, don't share the actual thing, rather in an alternative way by reiterating as something that already exists, to maybe miadirect yet get the right feedback, you keep your original idea with you and get feedback too. This needs to be done well else you end up frustrating everyone. Aight, peace out!