Meaning of don't worry about people stealing your idea

Book Source - "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be" by Paul Arden."

The Howard Aiken quote that Paul Arden references in the book has always had me a bit confused about exactly what he meant until I took some time to read extensively about what he meant then I really understood it.

The quote says “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you’ll have to ram it down their throats.”

When you get a really original and great idea, you wouldn't need an explanation for this quote, you'll experience it first hand.

New ideas are usually not accepted by people which the excitement and enthusiasm of the one who had the idea. Not because they’re wrong but because they don’t fit nicely into what already is. The familiar is easy to spread around. The unfamiliar is something we naturally resist, deny or ignore.

A lady in a movie made a statement, she said people fear the thing they don't understand and it's similar to this quote.

Like the time I proposed a slight adjustment to the way we were tracking assignments at work. It was not exactly a revolutionary idea, just a minor tweak. People ignored and overlooked the idea and kept going. Later, the same idea was proposed by the boss and because it was the boss they had no choice than to implement it. Suddenly, it was a big deal. I thought maybe I didn’t explain it well enough in the first place.

The opposite can occur to where you the one with the idea think your idea is too obvious people should already know and be doing this but you'd be surprised. I wrote down a business idea for my local community and I let it sit for months. I kept telling myself it was so obvious, then I shared it with someone and the person looked shocked. This is not just any person, this is a woman in her 40s with multiple successful businesses, real estate to mini malls.

But more often than not, people are going to undermine and undervalue the true value of your idea and I think that’s when the quote starts to make sense.

Original ideas are hard to give away because nobody’s looking for them. We’re all too busy protecting the system that already sort of works.

It’s not about their genius level, it's primarily the friction going on. That's the way of the world so if you're going to let the naysayers stop you, you've denied yourself of a potentially great dream.

Remember that it's going to be apathy before enthusiasm.