#growth What's so bad about stealing anyways? <!-- import ReactAudioPlayer from 'react-audio-player'; <ReactAudioPlayer src="https://sndup.net/22ch/d" controls />--> > ![[assets/poetry.mp3]] > > _If you like it and you understand it and it means something to you, it's yours._ > &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp― Matthew McConaughey's mom P.S. Matthew McConaughey's book [Greenlights](https://www.audible.com/pd/Greenlights-Audiobook/0593294181) is fantastic. There's a reason stealing is illegal. When you steal another person's property, they lose access to it. When you steal another person's intellectual property, there is the [potential for lost revenue](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2018-19/november-december/ability-achieve-lost-sales-consideration-damages-analyses-under-different-legal-frameworks/). These forms of stealing negatively affect the owner. That's why stealing is bad. But if, while stealing, you [[Do Good and Break the Rules|do more good than bad]] for the owner of the property, you're probably in the clear. I cut a snippet out of _Greenlights_ because it's fantastic. That is illegal, and it is stealing. McConaughey can send me a cease and desist and sue me for lost revenue, but it's more likely that my link above and genuine promotion of the content brings him money rather causes him to lose revenue. It's a dangerous thing to do, and you're at the whim of the owner of the content and their ability to prove their case. That said, there is almost nothing I know or have done that didn't [[Impostor Syndrome|come from someone else]]. I steal other people's genius, and the collective whole of what I have learned from other people has defined my own beliefs. <!-- TODO: Flesh this out. Fights impostor syndrome and promotes confidence. It's tied to the way we learn. When we are actively thinking about how to take something and make it our own, we engage with it and end up remembering it because we engage with it. Contrarily, when we read a textbook, we know that information is not _ours_, so we do not engage in active learning. The math Core system is all about active learning, and transforming a textbook problem into a personal problem. The Core system encourages its students to steal the ideas it is teaching, and apply them to each student's own life. https://publish.obsidian.md/andymatuschak/Do+your+own+thinking --> An exert from [[No Zero Days|no zero days]]: > almost every fucking thing we've all ever thought of, or felt, or gone through, or wanted, or wanted to know how to do, or whatever, has been figured out by someone else. For the vast, vast majority of things in our life, that is just true. Someone else has been through the same thing, thought about in retrospect, and probably written about it. Almost everything has already been done, or at least a similar thing has been done. And if everything has pretty much already been done, then let's just re-use it! Whatever thought we have probably isn't going to be original anyways, so just skip a step and steal it from someone else. And give credit along the way. <!--I could tell the story about how I got accused of plagiarism in my freshman year of high school because my teacher typed my story into google and got hits. I wrote that myself, but it sounded like I plagiarized.--> So why should I write this blog if all the ideas have been written before? Because they haven't all been combined before, in the way that is important to me. In these notes, I'm laying the groundwork for my philosophy on life and describing the things I [[Spirituality and Faith|believe in]]. Individually they have all existed for years, but together they are unique to me. You can read what I have to say, and you'll build your own set of beliefs and philosophy that guide the way you think and act. [[Be Polarizing|This is a nuanced problem]], but the tldr is that the black-and-white statement "do not steal" doesn't always apply.