When Someone Takes Your Idea

Back in August, I posted a viral video about workplace mobbing and received overwhelming support from people who could finally put their experiences into words. Recently, another creator copied my content word for word, highlighting the issue of content theft. 

This incident made me reflect on how similar situations happen at work, where ideas are stolen without clear attribution. I discuss the importance of making your ideas traceable, providing context, and using documentation to protect your intellectual contributions. 

The takeaway: adapt to protect your ideas and ensure they are recognized where it matters.

Check out the detailed show notes (https://tarakermiet.com/podcast/) and leave your thoughts or questions about today's topic.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: The Viral Post
• 1:31 Discovering the Copycat
• 2:55 Confronting the Issue
• 3:38 Workplace Idea Theft
• 5:54 Strategies to Protect Your Ideas
• 8:31 Conclusion: Adapting and Moving Forward

Transcript

[00:00:00] So back in August, I had a post that ended up going viral. It was about workplace mobbing, and I had actually posted it as a video response to a comment that I got on another video. Anyways, the video blew up, at least for me, and what I consider blowing up, and I was getting tons of comments and messages from people thanking me for putting words to this.

I could actually kind of feel the relief in their notes about how they could now explain what was happening to them at work. And while the post itself had been kind of an add-on to my content strategy, it was still something that I made. What I talked about came from years of listening to people talk about work and burnout and frustration and not having language for it.

I was also kind of compiling and decoding the research that I was finding. So anyways, fast forward to last week and I get this DM from someone letting me know that another creator's video was very familiar to mine. So I went ahead and checked it out and I wasn't really thinking anything of it. I just assumed that maybe it would be a similar idea [00:01:00] or the same theme of some sort.

'cause honestly, that happens all the time here in content creation. But within maybe 10 seconds or less, I could tell that this person was repeating my words. It was my post. It had the same opening, same progression, same kind of way. The idea unfolded, and even the phrases and inflection points were eerily similar.

Literally word for word just delivered months later on this person's platform like it had originated with her. And don't get me wrong, I know I didn't come up with the concept of workplace mobbing. That's not what I'm claiming here, but it was how I described it for my audience that clicked for them and she flat out stole it.

The good thing was one of my followers had already commented on her video asking if she copied me. So shout out to Grace for having my back, and the creator actually replied to acting all confused like, who's Tara? I don't know who she is. Like she's never even heard my name and I'm not gonna lie. I saw that and I was.

Really annoyed. I was half [00:02:00] tempted to comment right there and be like, yo, I'm Tara. But honestly, I didn't wanna add to her engagement numbers. I know that's petty, but that's just where I was in the moment. Okay. So I went ahead and messaged her privately about it, and of course I didn't get a response, and I don't always do this, but I did wanna look more closely at her content just to see if she had.

Stolen anything else of mine, which I couldn't find anything else, so that's good. But I did see the same pattern over and over again. In the handful of videos that I went through, there were people in her comments on a lot of the videos, calling her out for taking other people's ideas and language. So at that point, I knew this wasn't personal anymore.

This was just how this person operated. So I blocked her and I moved on. Honestly, she wasn't worth any more of my time or energy. I had enough information to decide how much access made sense, and that was it. Now, later, when I was thinking about why that felt so different from similar situations at work, it clicked for me.

That situation [00:03:00] was fairly clean, but at work, it almost never is At work, the same kind of thing happens, but it's a little muddier. Maybe you're in a meeting and you share an idea. Maybe you don't even think of it as your idea. You're just thinking out loud and connecting the dots. Everyone's just part of the conversation, trying to move things forward.

So honestly, it feels collaborative in the moment. But then someone else brings your idea back later, maybe not even in the same meeting, maybe in a different conversation or in a slide deck or maybe in front of leadership. And you hear it and you recognize it instantly. And it's not just the idea itself, but the shape of it, the way it was built and the logic underneath it.

The foundation is the same along with the message, but unlike my situation this time, there's just enough ambiguity to mess with you. Did they even realize it? Did anyone else notice that it came from me originally? Would it be weird to say something now? And that's the difference between my story and yours?[00:04:00] 

I had clear documentation that shows the similarities between my video and hers with exact timestamps. I took screenshots and screen recordings, so I had record of it, and that's helpful because I had information that made it easy for me to move on at work. You almost never have that clean side-by-side comparison.

You don't always have receipts. You just have a feeling that something shifted and really no clean way to prove it without looking defensive or like you're trying to stir up some drama. When you don't have those receipts, the mistake you're likely to make is to turn inward. So you start interrogating your own memory instead of the situation telling yourself that maybe you didn't say it clearly or maybe it wasn't that original, and that internal debate is what holds you back.

The fact is work systems don't track ideas well, they don't necessarily remember or honestly care about who thought of something first. They just remember who the idea is attached to when it becomes useful. [00:05:00] That's just how fast moving environments function. And once you acknowledge this, then your response can shift to how do you make your thinking easier to trace next time.

The first thing that changes is how you share ideas in real time. A lot of us drop ideas into meetings. The way you drop something into a group chat, they're half formed, pretty casual. No real setup provided. And while that feels collaborative, it makes your thinking harder to track. So instead of just saying the idea, give it a little more context.

What were you working on when it came up? What problem were you trying to solve? Building that context around the idea lets people see where the idea lives and it builds a stronger foundation that connects to you. Then you also give the system a second chance to register it through a clean recap, a shared doc, or some sort of message that connects you to the thinking.

Again, we all know how much repetition helps with memory, so the more that your name and the idea can show up together, the better. This also changes how you [00:06:00] respond in that meeting. When someone repeats your idea, you already know that the idea exists elsewhere with your name attached to it. So if you do say something, it comes out more like orientation than any sort of defense.

You're essentially just reconnecting the thread instead of pulling it back. And if this person is like that creator and it keeps happening as pattern behavior, that's information that you can use. You don't necessarily have to confront them to respond to the pattern. You can change how much access they have to your early thinking.

Maybe you stop brainstorming out loud as much when they're in a room with you, or maybe you share later in the process when there's more of a record. It's somewhat a mix of being strategically guarded and adapting to how the environment works. The reason this matters so much is because when this keeps happening, folks either overwork to stay visible or they completely disengage, and both aren't really helpful because neither one fixes the actual problem.

What fixes it is designing how your work moves through the system so you're not relying on [00:07:00] goodwill or memory to protect it. This isn't really about the coworker. Sure, it's annoying that they're doing this, but it's more about how ideas travel, where you work, and whether you're setting yourself up to be remembered or pushed aside.

So the takeaway here isn't that you need to be louder, quicker, or more assertive in meetings. Heck, most of the folks that this is happening to are already thoughtful contributors who are paying attention and doing the kind of thinking that moves work forward. It's not the confidence that's missing, it's the containment.

A lot of corporate environments are set up in a way where ideas move faster than ownership. Things get said, they get repeated, they get reshaped, and whoever happens to be closest in the moment when leadership decides that it's worth acting on, becomes the person associated with it. Now, here's the part that I keep coming back to.

What bothered me about that creator wasn't just that she took my words, that was super annoying, don't get me wrong, but it was that she tried to pretend that she didn't know what she was doing. That [00:08:00] disconnect honestly told me everything that I needed to know about how she related to her work and to other people.

And that's often what's actually happening for you at work too. When someone takes your idea and rebrands it, you realize something about how this place works or how that person works, or how much protection your thinking actually has here, and that realization can feel unsettling because it forces you to update your mental model.

You're no longer operating under the assumption that contribution automatically equals recognition, or that collaboration naturally means care. Or that people will even remember where things came from, just because it feels obvious to you. And once that assumption gets shattered, you have a choice. You can keep operating the same way and stay frustrated when this happens again, inevitably.

Or you can adjust how much of yourself you offer in spaces that don't know what to do with it. It doesn't mean that you become cynical and totally guarded, or that you stop being thoughtful. It means that you become more discerning about [00:09:00] where your energy actually belongs. For me, blocking that creator was about deciding that I didn't need to keep engaging with something that felt misaligned.

That decision gave me relief because it was clean At work, your version of that decision will look very different. It might be a small shift in where you share ideas or how long you stay attached to them, or which rooms actually get your early thinking. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is trust what you noticed, adjust how you show up moving forward and let that be enough.

Alright, friend, that's all I have for you this time. Take care and make good choices.