Your Thoughts. Their Currency

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”                                                           

-Albert Einstein (allegedly)

Noone is trying to patent their dinner conversation or trademark an open conversation between friends and peers.

We don’t want to start gatekeeping half formed ideas and sudden insights. Information should be transactional. Whether we barter with thoughts or a form of payment, there should always be a medium of exchange taking place.

The problem is this.

Imagine you're in conversation with someone. Ideas flowing freely. Connections you're still working out in real time. You're thinking out loud because that's what you do with people you consider collaborators, friends, allies.

Then you see it. Your insight, your language, your framework. Polished and presented as theirs. Maybe it's in their social media post. Maybe it's in a talk or advice they offer to someone else, delivered with the confidence of original thinking. Maybe they even say it back to you later, as if teaching you something new.

You think back to the conversations you’ve had with this person and realise that it was never a collaboration. It was an extraction. A harvest. They offered no insight of their own during the exchanges.

Now you’re pissed off. Your ego screams for recognition. You want to call them out but then the voice of reason starts telling you to calm down and stop overreacting. That you’re being petty.

Tell that voice to shut up.

The ego is correct. You have every right to be pissed off. Your mistake wasn’t that you shared. Your mistake was that you failed to recognise who you were sharing with.

This isn't about being precious with ideas or demanding credit for every influence- we all stand on the shoulders of countless others and most human progress comes from ideas colliding, combining and evolving across minds.

This is about people who systematically take without giving. Who extract intellectual and creative labour while contributing nothing. Present others insights as their own original work and benefit professionally, socially, reputationally from theft.

But you’re shit out of luck.

This is theft that can’t be reported.

The violation here is relational, not transactional. That the thief is acting like they are the fountain instead of the reservoir. You shared freely because you thought you were among equals, engaging in the kind of mutual exchange that makes both people sharper, more creative, more alive.

And because you weren't trying to own these ideas. Because you shared them freely, you have no recourse. There's no copyright on conversational insights. There's no patent on the observation you made over coffee. There's just the sick recognition that someone you trusted saw you differently than you saw them.

Your generosity and trust will be read as abundance they could draw from. Their extraction, repackaged as their own, will be read as brilliance.

Naturally they’ll claim ignorance. Some will even believe their own lies. They’ll act confused or even offended.

The audacity.

What they took from you came from somewhere. It came from your reading, your reflection, your lived experience, your particular way of putting things together. That doesn't disappear just because someone else is performing it. You're still the source. And you’ll learn who to share it with.

Eventually, you learn to be more careful. Not cynical, necessarily, but discerning.

You learn the difference between people who think with you and people who think through you. You learn to notice who brings their own substance to the table and who reflects yours back.

You learn that collaboration requires actual mutuality. It requires both people being willing to be influenced, to credit each other, to see each other's contributions. Without that, it's not collaboration. It's just one person taking notes while the other one talks.

You don't have to become guarded with everyone. But you can become more attuned to reciprocity. Does this person offer their own thinking, or mainly draw out yours? Do they acknowledge influences and connections, or do their ideas emerge fully formed from their own genius? Do you feel energized by the mutual exchange, or drained by the one-way flow?

Your insights, your frameworks, your ways of seeing the world- these have value. Not necessarily monetary value, but intellectual and creative value. You get to choose who you share them with. You get to choose who gets access to your thinking before it's fully formed.

And when you find people who truly collaborate, who build with you rather than borrowing from you, who acknowledge and credit and reciprocate- hold onto those relationships. That's the thing you thought you had before.

The rats?

Let them figure out what to say when they can no longer harvest your mind.