"If it's to be, it's up me!"

If it's to be, it's up me!

A legacy of time wasting moments has left me with a devilish mind game I like to call "It's up me!" It consists of reading an article or blog post, and then forcing myself to think of the three most important things that could ever happen in my life. I then try my best to remember these three things every day for six months. These memories will serve as a reminder in case all else falls apart and, as corny as this sounds, if you don't believe that all things are possible, you won't believe anything is possible.

Make sure you have someone else write down these memories for you. Otherwise the chance of you remembering these memories in six months is pretty small.

If it's to be, it's up me!

I've had a lot of my ideas stolen by others. It's happened to everyone in the world and will continue to happen until the end of time. This is why the best way to protect your business idea, product, or service is to make sure that no one even knows what you're doing. If someone does find out about your idea then if they don't tell anyone about it, there is no harm done—and if they do steal your idea and try to market it as their own then you have a lawsuit on your hands.

As a matter of fact, lawsuits are the best way to protect ideas. Many times it's not the other person who is to blame, but you. It could be that your idea is so great that someone else thinks they can't pretend not to know about it. That's fine.

When I was working for Motorola we had an idea for a digital camera identical in size and style to the L series cameras we were making at the time (L1, L2, and L3). It would have been smaller than those cameras with updated technology like CMOS and other innovations like picture-by-picture mode. Some employees from Kodak had also stolen our idea by patenting their own version of this new digital camera. The fact that Kodak had patented the idea made it too risky for Motorola to release their camera. The lawsuit lasted three years (this is the norm) and I remember a lot of employees were upset about it. I felt bad for my boss as well since he lost a lot of money in legal fees.

One day, I was looking at the Kodak patent and noticed something. On the front page was a picture of their camera that looked like ours, but on closer inspection it wasn't actually their camera, it was our L2 camera! As a matter of fact, the entire patent looked nothing like our new digital camera—and that's when all hell broke loose.

It turned out Kodak had never built or even taken pictures with this new digital camera that they'd patented. It was just a ploy to steal our idea and get us to delay our launch until they felt like doing the real thing. We had the grounds for a countersuit and did not hesitate to take legal action. The case was settled out of court and here's what I learned:

Patents can protect your idea, but only if you actually make something with it first. Even then, someone could copy your product and make it look different enough where no one can confuse the two products.

There is no such thing as stealing ideas. Even if you have the same idea as someone else—it doesn't mean they're doing something wrong. Let them do it and market it. Just make sure you are a little bit better at it than they are, and that's when you'll get ahead of the game.

If anyone knows about your intellectual property then they can't steal it—they already have it!

If you want to keep your ideas private then be prepared for the worst-case scenario—and trust me, lawsuits are almost never bad for you.