Give everything away constantly.

Share your knowledge. Help without expecting anything back. Reveal the processes others keep proprietary. Conventional business advice says hoard your expertise—it’s what sets you apart. But your real value comes from what you keep making, not what you withhold.

Open-source contributors build reputations by giving code away. Writers share their techniques because execution matters more than knowing the technique. A chef can publish every recipe and still cook rings around you—the dish demands skill and judgment no page can transfer. Sharing creates more opportunities than hoarding. The person known for generous expertise attracts collaborators, students, partners. Hoarding assumes a fixed supply. Sharing recognizes that knowledge multiplies when it moves.

Holding back forces constant calculation: what to reveal, how much, to whom. That burns energy on gatekeeping instead of creation. Giving freely drops the mental load. You focus on doing excellent work instead of protecting mediocre secrets.

Fear drives hoarding—fear that your advantage is fragile, that someone will surpass you, that your value depends on knowing things others don’t. Confident people give freely. If you can create faster than others can copy, you lose nothing.

Total transparency has limits. Personal privacy matters. Some secrets protect others—client confidentiality, security vulnerabilities, private struggles. The principle fits knowledge work: methods, insights, frameworks, lessons. It fits less where disclosure causes harm.

Gift economies predate markets. Indigenous cultures understood that generosity creates bonds that outlast transactions. Academic tradition built on free exchange—publish or perish meant share or stagnate. Remix culture proves it: artists sample, programmers fork, writers build on predecessors. Culture advances through sharing, not hoarding.

We’re conditioned against this. Schools grade on curves. Businesses measure market share as though economics were zero-sum. Shifting to abundance means trusting that generosity compounds—not through direct exchange but through ripple effects, reputation, and the satisfaction of watching others succeed with what you gave them.

Give not because it builds your reputation or creates obligation. Give because withholding exhausts you. Give because knowledge grows when free. Give because we’re all figuring this out together and pretending otherwise slows us all.

What you create next shows mastery, not what you hoard from yesterday.

Sources:

  • Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (1983)
  • Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925)
  • Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
  • Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966)
  • Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008)