Imagine this, you have a new plan for a business you want to start, you excitedly tell your friends and family about it, and… let me stop you right there, I’m going give you 8 good reasons why you shouldn’t tell anyone your plans.
Table of Contents
1. It’d be embarrassing if you fail
I know you may not see it now but it can be embarrassing if you fail especially after you grandly announce your plan to everyone else.
Let me tell you a story…
When I was in high school, I told my friends that I wanted to be a doctor because I saw a quote somewhere that if you tell people your plans, it’s less likely to fail since you’d be afraid of failing and embarrassing yourself that you’d work harder. You’ll see why despite some logic in that quote, it’s still not a good idea.
Yes, I ended up not pursuing the doctor path and for a while, I was stubbornly refusing to give up even though I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to give up partly because of how embarrassing it’d be to go to a high school reunion without achieving my doctor dream.
There’s such a thing called sunk cost. sometimes a plan just isn’t going to work doesn’t matter how hard you try or maybe you just don’t have passion for it anymore. In those instances, you need to give up and pursue something else but if you already told people, you may be more reluctant to. You may make it out of fear of embarrassment but would you be happy to achieve something that you have no passion for anymore?
Don’t tell anyone your plan unless you’re absolutely certain that you’d make it but unfortunately, we can be positive all we want and the only way to have a 100% guarantee is if we made it already. Only tell once it’s underway and/or once it’s done.
2. You may miss out on other opportunities
Let’s say you found another business idea that is better than your current one and you realized that your current business idea was never going to work anyway but to save face, you may be more reluctant to give up thus losing your opportunities on other projects.
This is the reason we should keep our mouths shut about our next steps.
3. Some people may prevent you from succeeding
You may not see it now but some people won’t be too happy if you succeed. Some of those people may be close to you. There’s a saying that your biggest enemy is someone closest to you and your biggest supporter is someone you don’t know. There are some truths to it.
Telling people your plan may invite some jealousy.
Doesn’t matter how much you love your friend, you may still feel some form of jealousy however small when something extremely good happens to them.
Don’t believe me? Imagine if you were working at Mcdonald’s for $10/hour and your best friend who was working with you at Mcdonald’s won 10 million dollars. They don’t ever have to work again. Let’s leave the question of whether they’d share some winning with you out of the equation for now but most of you in that situation would feel happy for your friend but soon after not feel too good. You’d think about how it’d feel to work at Mcdonald’s by yourself while your best friend is having the time of their lives and never have to worry about money again. That happiness for your friend could soon grow into resentment.
This is what I’m talking about. Yes, indeed, you could love your friends and family but it’s human nature that people won’t always feel too happy with the idea of somebody close to them succeeding. Maye it’d be hard for anyone to admit and it may come out in a discrete way, but somehow someone may prevent you from succeeding. They could discourage your dream, they could make fun of you, etc.
I don’t want to make it sound like you can’t trust anyone but I want you to be aware of the possibility that someone may not be too happy about your grand plan.
4. Show them, don’t tell them
This is absolutely true. Instead of telling people what you’re going to do, just do it. Show them the result.
Don’t tell them that you’re going to start a business. Start it and when it’s doing well, tell them about it.
Don’t tell people that you’re going to quit your job and apply for Facebook as a software engineer, apply it, get in, make the switch, and then tell them.
5. Leave room for adaptation
You want to leave room for your plan to change and adapt. If you already tell people what you’re going to do, you may restrict yourself from expanding.
Say you told people that you want to start a business selling hamburgers and someone tells you that selling hamburgers it’s too difficult. It’s too competitive. You may be tempted to prove them wrong by actually starting a hamburger business despite it being only a seed idea at the time. But, you do more research and found out that you’d actually make more money selling hot dogs, now some people would let their ego take hold and refuse to adapt and switch to a hot dog business.
This is why we should leave most details out when discussing our plans or don’t discuss them at all.
Personally, I think there can be good things to extract out of telling people your plan. They can tell you their two cents and you’d see whether this is a viable idea or not but if you’re going to do so, leave the details out so you have room to expand, change, and adapt.
6. You’ll be more patient if you don’t tell anyone
All success takes time. There’s no overnight success.
When you tell everyone your plans, here’s what’s going to happen: you’ll feel impatient to achieve the end goal and see the result. This will lead you to cut corners. Something that shouldn’t have been given the green light will be given the green light because you’re impatient and want to get to the next step quickly.
You’ll find yourself with more patience if you aren’t in a rush to prove anything to anybody.
When everyone knows about your plan, they may also keep an eye out for your progress. Depending on your business, it may be easy to tell what progress you’ve made and how far you still have to go. This can create some panic and urgency in you. So instead of doing things thoroughly and making sure you create high-quality content, you’d rush to throw something out. You may also feel too much pressure to perform and thus give up.
Don’t tell them your full plan so you can give yourself the time and patience to work at it at your own pace.
7. Prevent your ideas from being stolen
Some of you may disagree with me here because after all, an idea is just an idea without action. For someone to turn an idea into an actual thing, it takes a lot of willpower and energy.
Not everyone has the incentive to steal your idea nevertheless, it’s not impossible for your idea to be stolen.
If you want to tell someone your plan, make it someone you know personally because it’s harder for someone you know to steal your idea but a stranger on the internet is more likely to.
8. Privacy
It can be hard to believe that people still care about privacy because in today’s age it seems like we share everything with the world on social media but yes, some of us still do care about our privacy.
And if you want to keep your privacy intact, you may want to reframe from telling the world your plan. It keeps the nosy people out.
Final thought
So here we are, 8 reasons why you shouldn’t tell people your plans. Did I miss any? Comment down below! 🙂
