How to Stop Your Work from Being Stolen | Protect Your Ideas and Thrive

How to stop your work from being stolen. So I got a great question, a kind of sad question, from one of my YouTube viewers. Love you guys. Patrick David, who wrote in to say, so much of my work has been stolen by other people who use it to advance themselves in their career. How can I stop this? Is this even possible? And I now feel like a worthless individual. I'm poor, I'm humble, I'm not a violent person. My circumstances allow me to be all over, and since I no longer have anything to give to the world, I feel like there is no room for young men. I give up. Help me help you. Patrick, you can't give up, man. You cannot give up because that means that they won. And as a young man, as a young person, still a lot of brightness ahead of them, you gotta remember that this, you know, you have, you still have a lot of time left, man, and you cannot stop pursuing whatever your ideas are. I'm gonna give you 3 ways to help prevent future work from being stolen, and hopefully it helps answer your question. Number 1 is protect yourself. Now, I don't know what kind of ideas you have, but if it's a business idea, you can get it patented. You might want to look at getting something copyrighted. You know, whatever is being stolen, it's worth talking to an intellectual property lawyer and seeing, is this something I can protect and how to do it? Again, I don't know specifics of your case, but with more details, you can figure it out. Number 2 is change your surroundings. It kind of feels like the people around you are screwing you over. Again, you weren't too specific. In the email, but it feels like the people who are in your life who maybe you collaborate with are not the greatest people and they're stealing your ideas. You gotta change your surroundings, and this could be a great moment for you, right? The highly successful people in the world, a lot of them have had huge hardships and have been screwed over many times in the past, and they learn from that. Now I think of Walt Disney, who was a struggling artist trying to figure out his art business, how to make this a go as a struggling cartoonist and not knowing how he'd ever make money and being poor and, you know, having to sleep at his office and eat beans because he didn't have enough money to survive. And his first creation was a cartoon called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. And he created it and he, you know, started making some money off of it. And then he found out that the dealer that he went through, the agency that he worked with to land the deal, The contract that he signed gave them complete control over his creation. So think about it, like, he was struggling. He's living in his office, eating beans, you know, not enough money to survive. He finally makes his big break. He finally gets it to go through. He gets it, has his creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and he makes a little bit of money, and then they steal it away from him, and he's got nothing, and he's going to start all over again. And the idea for Mickey Mouse, his next creation, came from, you know, the place that he was staying had mice in it, right? That's how great a place it was. It had mice, and one of them was really friendly to him, and he wanted to create a cartoon character after that mouse. And so he turned that adversity into strength and created something new. And you can bet that when he created Mickey Mouse and started to market and promote it, He owned it, right? He wasn't making that same mistake again. So whatever happened to you, you've learned the lesson. You're still young, you've learned the lesson, and use that for your next great thing that you create. Another example that I remember is from Sam Walton. He's the founder of Walmart. He became one of the richest people in the world, and his first location, he rented from the landlord that was in the building, and the landlord saw how successful it was that when Sam Walton came to renew the lease, he said, "No, I don't want to renew the lease," and he refused to give Sam Walton his location. And then he had to leave, and the landlord set up the same business in the same location. Think about it, you spend so much time investing in building up a business, in marketing it, in getting people to come, and then to just have it swooped out from under you and have to start all over again and have your landlord take it over for you. It sucks. And Sam Walton and Walt Disney could have given up and said, this sucks, you know, my life is over, I'm gonna go just get a job and hate the rest of my life, and I give up. Or they can go back and get to work and start something new and not make that same mistake again. You can bet that Sam Walton was never gonna sign another short-term lease again in his life. He learned a valuable lesson, it made him a better entrepreneur, and he learned from it. So change your surroundings, right? You want to be surrounded by the people who are supportive of what you do, who aren't screwing you over, who believe in the mission that you're on. And I really feel like the people in your life right now aren't, uh, aren't helping you on your path. Number 3: Ignore and move on. Listen, the past is the past, right? You do not gain anything by continuing to harp over the past. You learn from the mistakes and you move on. I've had a lot of stuff happen to me. I've had people screw me over in deals. I've had people do crazy things for their own promotion that damage me. You know, I had a woman who set up a Facebook page pretending to be married to me, saying she was my wife, and then started, you know, trying to sell products and saying that I endorsed this stuff. That I— like, I didn't even know who this woman was. What she was selling, and somebody in my community alerted me to it. It's like, ah, like this happens. The more important the mission you're on, the more you're trying to change the world, the bigger you get, the bigger your ideas are, the more people are going to try to knock you down, are going to try to steal a little bit of your light. But you have to keep going, and you can't stop, because when you stop, they win. And you got to remember, in the long run, you're going to be the winner, not them. You're going to be the winner because You're creating new ideas. That's just one idea. That one idea of yours, those 5 ideas of yours, fine, say they're all stolen. You've got a million more great ideas coming because that's the kind of person you are. Because you're a creative entrepreneur ready to take on the world. Where those people, you know, talk about some serious little man, those people, they can't create anything. They're never gonna win long term. So they made a little bit of money off of this thing fine, they're never gonna be able to exploit it to become anything great because they can't come up with the creative ideas that you can. So in the long term, you win, but you have to keep going. You can't give up. This is just the start, man. You're young, you got a bright future ahead of you, and you got to keep going. So remember, how to stop your work from being stolen: number 1, protect yourself; number 2, change your surroundings; number 3, ignore and move on; and believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, you can subscribe to the channel to see more just like it. Thank you so much, and I will see you soon. If you want more believe energy running through your veins, sign up for the newsletter below. It's free. You're going to love it.

Hi, I'm Jason J. Ros Fonseca of RiseOnline.com, and I want to say Evan Carmichael's newsletter is consistent, fun, inspiring, and it's the only newsletter I prioritize and look forward to, period.