secrets Archives - Steve Sammartino

Better questions

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Steve Sammartino

I recently met someone at a conference I was speaking at. Afterwards we exchanged some emails on a new project he was working on. He needed a developer, but was nervous about sharing his idea with anyone. After I assured him that there is rarely currency in ideas, and having them stolen was a low risk, I offered to connect him with my development team. Which from my talk, he would’ve known they were overseas. He sent back an email which said:

Where are they based?

This was my response:

Based overseas…. Moldova to be precise. I’m sensing that might by why you asked….

Here’s a some better questions:

How good are there?
Are they trust worthy?
What do they cost?
How do I connect with them?

Often our perception makes us ask questions which are for the large part irrelevant.

The truth about secrets

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

Secrets kills us. They eat at our souls and disrupt our emotions in a negative way. We very rarely feel good about secrets because by nature we are social creatures that rely and need each other to survive. Collaboration is what put us atop of the food chain and that means we must share. I’m certain the feeling we often get when we hold secrets is our genetic code telling us that secrets are not cool and generally don’t lead to ideal outcomes.

So it got me thinking about the nature of secrets and the different types of them.

There are many types of secrets, but these 2 are interesting:

Secrets that hide things we have done for fear of judgement or persecution.
Secrets that hide things which are ideas we want to benefit from at the exclusion of others.

These are 2 types of secrets we should avoid.

The first one should be avoided because we shouldn’t do anything dodgy, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of anything that is out of our control.

The second is counter intuitive. Our emotional need to share secrets is our DNA telling us it will create more for everyone. A shared idea can often be improved, a shared idea creates a team to build it, a shared idea increases access to resources, a shared idea creates a market place and a bigger pie for all. Stealing ideas is not the same as stealing chestnuts. If we exchange ideas, we both end up with more ideas than we started with.

Startup blog maths:

Sharing > Secrets