Me and Sheldon Making Funny Faces
My father in law is talented; I mean really talented. He’s a hypno-therapist whose clients absolutely love him. Through his work he has changed lives (including my own – he’s one of my main inspirations for becoming an observant Jew). There’s just one problem. If you look for him on the web he’s practically non-existent.
Try it. Type in “Sheldon Libby Therapist” on Google. Sure he comes up in the first three results: (1) a directory called “Revolution Health,” (2) another directory called “HelpPro,” and (3) his own website, but notice something about all these results? For each of them you get some information about him, at best a write up of the kind of work he does, but nowhere do you see anything written by him. There’s a reason for that.
My father in law has thousands of hand written pages in his possession of original work that could really help people. He wants to publish it and have people see it, but in every conversation I’ve ever had with him about putting his stuff out there on a blog or in social media he’s said the same thing: “people plagiarize stuff in the social work industry.” He’s afraid of publishing his work online because he thinks people are going to steal it.
Tonight we had an interesting phone conversation, and his these fears came up, yet again. I told him, “obscurity is worse than plagiarism.” The Internet has changed everything. We have produced more information in the last three years than in all of recorded history combined. There is no excuse not to get your ideas out to the world, and a fear that someone will steal your work is just an excuse that keeps you from having to deliver.
“Can we copyright it or something?” he asked. That’s the beauty of the Internet. In reality, something is copyrighted the second you create it, but when that’s done on a piece of paper in the privacy of your home it may be hard to prove that you did it before someone else. Not so when you post online; every blog you publish, every Note you put on Facebook, every email you send gets a time and date stamp automatically put on it that is solid evidence of when you created an original piece of content. Proving you did something first is as easy as showing when you put it online.
I don’t know if my father in law will take our conversation and run with it. I would love to see him start posting daily therapy tidbits on his new Facebook Page I put up for him today. The take away for anyone reading this is you shouldn’t fear people wanting to steal your stuff. When you publish online you are securing your copyright in a very public manner. Put your energy into delivering great content, and remember some golden rules: imitation is the best form of flattery, you are an original no matter what you may think, and there are million ways to execute the same idea. Who knows where putting your stuff out there will lead? You may find it’s just what people have been waiting for.
