How Is Sharing Ideas Good for Creative Synergy

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We have ideas, original ideas, new perspectives, new takes on a variety of subjects. We grow attached to those ideas, we fear to share them with others, we fear they might be quicker to act. We fear the dark intentions lurking behind strangers’ eagerness to know what we know, what we think, what we’re working on…

Writers, especially suffer from this sort of anxiety. Because what if by pulling the curtain too much on unhatched ideas we throw away potential seeds of our intellectual property?

As an educator though, I believe ideas become more powerful when they are shared and spread out. Hoarding ideas as top-secret cuts the flow of creative synergy that could actually make them thrive.

We are afraid of giving someone else a chance to take our idea and run with it. And that could certainly happen. But as long as you don’t spill the beans to every stranger that walks by, shout it from the street corner, spell every inch of your idea out for someone, or give her a copy of your outlined or draft, or that person steals it from you, the final product might be similar in theme, but it could never be exactly the same.

It’s very rare for ideas to be completely new and different. We’re mostly reinventing old wheels. But when we do this from an authentic place, the way we deconstruct and reinvent the wheel is all our own.

Sharing Ideas is a Good Synergy Strategy because:

It offers an informal opportunity to shape and reshape your original idea
It allows you to filter the weak ideas and refine the ones with most potential
It helps you seek best-practices to set a time-table for the development of ideas and completion of projects
It gives you a chance to bounce off ideas from potential readers/audience/market
It allows you to leverage the experience and expertise of other creatives, and set foundations for collaboration
It provides an opportunity to gathering complementing ideas from readers/audience/experts to enhance the original draft, design, product.

Sharing nurtures the ground where our ideas might grow, with the help of other creatives curious about exploring the same topic from their own perspectives.

In the scientific field, once a hypothesis is out there, others are encouraged to try, to give the ideas a run for their money. As more scientist take up this idea and explore its implications, the more the field itself grows and the scientific and general public get pull toward it. It is a good thing. It generates interest, sparks controversy.

Closing ourselves off from sharing will have a direct repercussion on the impact and significance of our final product. Share on X

The universe of ideas does not speak only in our ear. It’s useful to remain humbled by this fact. And if we are going to focus on something, let’s focus on this, the idea is not what ought to be important or unique, is what we do with it that matters most.