Cheat Codes for Life I Wish I Knew at 19

All right, so we must be doing something right, because in the past week, I have had two pieces of content plagiarized, one word for word, another one pretty closely word for word, from two very large accounts on one on Twitter, one on LinkedIn. And I made a tweet about this before the second guy had kind of copied my work. And I wanted to share some thoughts on this, because I think this is something that people fear. And they’re like, what happens if my content gets ripped off? And my product, my competitor came over and took my thing, and they did a knockoff version of it. And it could be really frustrating. It can be really disheartening when you see your work out there just being all the effort, time, and energy that you went into creating the thing, and you see somebody else just getting the benefits of it, and you’re like, oh, this is such an unfair world. Well, I got a couple of thoughts on this. Number one is that it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.

It really doesn’t, because anybody that has to stoop to copying your work, they’re not going to survive in this game long enough anyway. And I know you could look and say, oh, they have a big following, and all this stuff, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to come back on them. Because I believe karma is maybe not like a thing that physically, actually, in an objective reality sense, exists. But I think on a long enough time frame, you get what you put out. And if you put out shit like that and you steal, there’s no way that that doesn’t erode your karmic contributions to the universe. But most importantly, I think the damage that really occurs here is the damage it does to yourself, to your internal reputation, your self esteem. I think naval ravikant says self esteem is the reputation you have with yourself.

And when you do these things, when you cheat, when you lie, when you steal from people, you will know, and that’s the most important person that will know anything. And so you’re not fooling the only person who ultimately matters, the person who is going to judge you every single day for the rest of your life, you got to live with that person. So for me, the karmic justice is the fact that I know they have to live with what they did. That’s awesome. Number two is that they are never going to be able to compete with me if they have to steal from me, because they aren’t me. So you can take my words, you can do that, but I can come up with that idea a million times over. I think a lot of times we get really precious about our content and our products because we think, I put so much time and energy into it. I’m a unique butterfly and that is the only thing that I’m ever going to be able to do.
But no, the work that you went into creating that thing, the most valuable aspect of that work was in what it was doing to you as the person capable of producing the work. That’s the value. So ripping off the content from somebody else, they didn’t get all that work. They don’t have the muscle, they don’t have the ability to produce these original thoughts or these interesting content ideas or this original product. Right? They can’t do it. All they can do is they can mimic what they see. And when you mimic what you see, you get this low resolution photocopy facsimile of the original thing and you just have to have confidence that you keep showing up, keep doing your thing, keep putting out your work that will shine through. People will be attracted to the original more than the facsimile and you will stand out in time.

And so I’m not really concerned when people plagiarize. That really doesn’t bother me at the end of the day, but it is something fun to talk about because we all have to experience it. At some point. Somebody’s going to come, they’re going to copyright, and they’re going to rip off your shit and it’s going to suck. And I’m not going to lie, it is frustrating, especially when you see it going viral and you’re like, that’s mine. That’s mine. I would like that to be those people to know that was mine, but it is what it is. That’s life.

And all you can do is put your nose back to the grindstone, get back to work, go write the next thing, go put out the work, and just keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t let anybody else put you off your path. Because at the end of the day, it’s just a race against yourself. Nobody else really matters. Your goal is to become the best, most awesome version of yourself as you possibly can. And if you just come to each and every single day with that approach, you can’t lose, regardless of what anybody else does. So hope this brings you some value, guys, we’ll catch you in the next episode.