Someone will steal my ideas

The web is a vast resource pool for ideas. If you upload your never-before-seen-going-to-make-me-millions idea onto the web it is inevitably going to become a potential idea trigger for someone else. No-one likes their ideas getting nicked by others.

Here are a couple of facts to consider about character ideas:

Even ideas you keep to yourself will eventually be ‘stolen’ if you wait long enough. There is some strange collective consciousness that seems to generate strikingly similar ideas. That is because creativity is about creating new combinations of existing ideas. So all the components of your unique idea are the same components others are working with and with millions of people generating new combinations there is a good likelihood that they will do something similar to what you’ve done.

Show me an original idea and chances are that I will be able to find something reasonably similar on the web. The problem is that if someone steals your idea they are likely to modify it into something a bit different. I am convinced that if you take all the characters in existence you will be able to draw up a taxonomy chart where every character has some original ancestor and offspring. They might have been uniquely created but they are unlikely to be uniquely unique.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. There are millions of ideas out there and a lot of them are probably much better than yours. It is the good ideas that are successfully executed that’s potentially worth millions. A thousand people might steal your idea but how many of those have what it takes to execute the idea successfully? The chances are that it’s none of them because people who steal ideas are unlikely to have what it takes to make it a success. So it does not matter that much. Those that know the dangers of stealing ideas would not risk it.

You either have the means to successfully execute the idea or you don’t. If you don’t then the idea hidden on your computer disk or in a drawer has a market value of exactly zero. If you showcase the character, people can at least see your talent and who knows, something might yet come from such exposure. Also, if you don’t have the means to execute the character then have faith in your ability to one day come up with another great idea when you do have the means.

There's a simple and effective way to protect your idea from the world: focus on getting the world to know about it, make it big and do it quick.  Once everyone knows your character there would be no point in stealing the idea because the world craves originality, not copies. 

Philippe Ingels

To see some of GrinLock's character ideas follow the links below:

Character developed for projects

Character we fully own