Give Away Everything You Know

Why would I ever seek to connect with my competitors?

On LinkedIn, at a trade show, over coffee, or anywhere else. Why would I deliberately spend time with people who are pursuing the same clients, developing similar products, and competing for the same opportunities?

And why on earth would I tell them what I'm working on?

It's a reasonable question, particularly in an industry where relationships, knowledge, and experience are valuable commercial assets. We're taught to develop our competitive advantage, protect our intellectual property, and be careful about giving too much away.

I understand the logic.

But I've never been particularly interested in treating everyone who competes with me as someone I need to keep at arm's length.

In fact, I've found that some of the most interesting professional conversations happen when we stop worrying quite so much about what the other person might take from them.

There's a passage from Paul Arden's It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be that has stayed with me for years.

His advice is to give away everything you know, because doing so leaves you with the responsibility of finding something new.

It's a counterintuitive idea.

And the longer I work, the more sense it makes to me.

The trouble with holding on.

We spend years building our knowledge, developing relationships, refining our judgement, and discovering better ways of doing things.

Naturally, we become attached to what we've learned.

An idea that took months to develop can feel like something we should protect. A strategy that has worked particularly well becomes part of our advantage, and sharing it with someone who might use it against us can seem commercially foolish.

But I wonder what happens when we become too protective of our own thinking.

When we begin to treat our ideas as possessions, we can become more concerned with preserving them than developing them.

We revisit familiar strategies because they worked before. We defend approaches we've invested time in, even when circumstances are changing. And sometimes, without quite realizing it, we begin to confuse being knowledgeable with having nothing left to learn.

It's a comfortable place to be, particularly when other people regard us as experts.

But comfort has a way of making us complacent.

One of the things I enjoy about insurance is that it doesn't allow me to stay comfortable for very long. There is always another complicated wording, an unfamiliar exposure, a difficult question, or a situation that challenges something I thought I understood.

And I would hate to lose that curiosity simply because I've reached a point in my career where I'm expected to know the answers.

An idea is not a finite resource.

I think we sometimes approach professional knowledge as though there were only so much of it to go around.

If I share an idea with you, perhaps I've lost something. If you take my strategy and use it successfully, perhaps I've given away an advantage.

But ideas don't work quite like that.

An idea shared doesn't disappear from the mind of the person who had it. It can be questioned, improved, challenged, or taken in a direction its originator never imagined.

And sometimes the act of explaining an idea to another person reveals its weaknesses more effectively than months of thinking about it alone.

I've experienced this countless times in conversations about insurance, particularly when discussing difficult placements, policy language, or the operational challenges facing brokerages.

Someone asks a question I hadn't considered. They approach the problem from a different angle, or describe a solution that would never have occurred to me.

Suddenly, the conversation has become more useful to both of us than it would have been if we'd each kept our thoughts to ourselves.

Of course, there's a difference between exchanging ideas and disclosing confidential information, proprietary work, or commercially sensitive details that aren't ours to share.

Professional generosity doesn't require abandoning good judgement.

But within those boundaries, I think we're often far more guarded than we need to be.

And I wonder how much we miss because of it.

What if your competitor is interesting?

I have never believed that the existence of a competitor diminishes my own opportunities.

Someone else can be exceptionally good at what they do without making me any less capable, and I can admire their work without feeling compelled to measure myself against it.

Earlier this year, I ran into my main competitor at an industry event.

Now, I'm not one to shy away from these encounters or pretend I haven't noticed someone standing across the room, so I made a point of striking up a conversation.

And what an interesting conversation it turned out to be.

Before long, we were commiserating over the state of the market, comparing perspectives, and eventually sharing ideas about how we might each take a little business away from the third major player in our particular sandbox.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Two competitors, enjoying a perfectly friendly conversation about how to compete with somebody else.

There was genuine warmth and camaraderie in the exchange, and I walked away thinking it had been the highlight of the event.

We hadn't suddenly stopped being competitors, and neither of us had forgotten our commercial interests. But for a little while, those interests weren't an obstacle to having an interesting, candid conversation.

And I think that's worth something.

We work in an industry full of complicated questions, changing expectations, and challenges that no single person or organization has completely figured out. It seems a shame to limit our conversations to people who happen to work on the same side of a commercial boundary.

Perhaps we'll disagree about how something should be done. Perhaps we'll discover that we've been approaching the same problem in entirely different ways.

Or perhaps we'll discover that we have more in common than our competing interests might suggest.

I've always liked the possibility of finding new friends in unlikely places.

The freedom to begin again.

What I find most compelling about Arden's philosophy isn't actually the generosity.

It's what happens afterward.

If we're willing to share our best ideas, we have to keep finding new ones.

We can't rely indefinitely on something clever we came up with five years ago, or allow our professional identity to become so closely attached to a particular achievement that we're afraid to move beyond it.

We have to remain observant, curious, and willing to change our minds.

And I think there's something liberating about that.

Our expertise becomes less about defending what we've already accumulated and more about trusting our ability to continue learning.

It's a different way of thinking about professional confidence.

Instead of asking, What do I know that nobody else knows? we might ask, What am I capable of discovering next?

One question encourages us to protect our position.

The other invites us to grow beyond it.

And perhaps the most interesting part is that the more willing we become to share our thinking, the more opportunities we create to encounter ideas that challenge it.

A different kind of leadership.

I think this philosophy becomes especially interesting when we consider how we lead people.

There is a familiar kind of authority built around being the person with the answers.

The experienced professional who knows the market, understands the systems, remembers the history, and can resolve problems that leave everyone else scratching their heads.

These people are valuable, and often for very good reasons.

But I've also seen how easily expertise can become a form of control, sometimes without anyone intending it to.

Knowledge stays concentrated in a few hands. Decisions depend on particular individuals. People learn to seek approval instead of developing the confidence to exercise their own judgement.

And the person everyone depends upon becomes increasingly indispensable, which can feel rewarding until they realize how difficult it has become to step away.

I prefer a different approach.

If I understand something well, I want the people around me to understand it, too.

If I've found a better way to do something, I want to share it. If someone asks how I've approached a problem, I'm generally happy to explain my reasoning, including the parts that didn't work.

Not because I have no interest in my own success, but because I don't believe success requires other people to remain less capable than I am.

I would much rather work with people who can challenge my thinking than surround myself with people who depend on it.

And if somebody takes an idea I've shared and develops it into something better, I hope I'll have the good sense to learn from them.

The kind of industry I'd like to work in.

Insurance is a relationship business, and for all our talk about competition, we're also part of a professional community.

We encounter one another throughout our careers, sometimes as colleagues, sometimes as competitors, sometimes as clients, and occasionally in roles none of us could have anticipated.

The broker you're competing with today may be someone you're collaborating with in five years. The person whose work you admire from a distance may become a mentor, a business partner, or a friend.

Our careers are long, and the industry is smaller than it sometimes appears.

I'd like to think we can compete seriously without becoming suspicious of one another, and pursue our own ambitions without treating everyone else's success as a threat.

We can be commercially astute and personally generous.

We can protect our clients' interests while sharing our professional insights.

We can have strong opinions, defend them thoughtfully, and remain interested in hearing why someone else sees things differently.

None of this guarantees that every conversation will be productive, or that everyone will approach professional relationships with the same openness.

Some people will take more than they give. Some ideas will be borrowed without acknowledgement, and some competitors will be more interested in gaining an advantage than having a genuine exchange.

That's life.

I don't think the possibility of encountering those people is a particularly good reason to close ourselves off from everyone else.

Give it away.

The older I get, the less interested I become in being the only person in the room who knows something.

I still care about being good at what I do. I enjoy solving difficult problems, developing ideas, and finding ways to make things work better.

But I don't need to own every good idea, and I certainly don't need other people to know less in order to feel confident in what I bring to the table.

There's more satisfaction in an interesting exchange, in discovering something I hadn't considered, or in seeing another person take an idea further than I could have taken it myself.

And there is a certain freedom in knowing that the value of our experience doesn't end with the knowledge we've already accumulated.

We can always learn something new.

So I'll continue connecting with competitors, asking questions, sharing ideas, and talking openly about the things I'm working on when it's appropriate to do so.

I'll probably give away a few good ideas along the way.

I hope other people will, too.

And who knows?

I might make a few new friends in unlikely places.