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No you can’t. Neither can anyone else. There is exactly one surefire way to make sure that your secret doesn’t get out – don’t tell anyone else. What most people forget is that there are all kinds of things that trigger conversation and spill your secret before you are ready. If a company is closing its doors, its employees will start looking for jobs right away – even if the closure isn’t public knowledge yet. If you’ve had a great business idea and shared it with someone over drinks, they shared it with someone else over drinks, or someone sitting nearby heard about it and was interested enough. If you’ve created an “anonymous” twitter account mocking someone, someone will give you credit eventually. People who you buy things from or sell things to will notice if there is a change in your patterns and suspect things. Nothing stays a secret for very long – so you may as well just get it out there ahead of the story and be ready to deal with the consequences.
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So this leads to the next obvious question: Should we be TRYING to keep secrets? There are an awful lot of them we’re supposed to keep: our salary, our business ideas, trade secrets, layoffs, etc.
Lots of times, we don’t really NEED to keep the secret at all, since the law protects us. Patents were created as a way to protect ideas while forcing inventors to share them. Copyright can protect things we make even if we NEVER share them. And I’ve seen many people argue that protecting business ideas is utterly pointless anyway.
My personal view is that we try to keep WAY TOO MANY secrets in general. But what do you think?
I think this hits it pretty spot on – too many secrets for no reason.
I simply can’t keep track of what I said to whom. That may have been the really terrible, selfish way to come around to telling the truth, but hey, whatever works.