I know that it’s a cliché to say “Karma is a boomerang.” On first hearing, it sounds so very fuzzy and far too simple to be meaningful.
Yet there is power in simply giving things away. And that is especially true when you are doing cutting edge technological research.
People often worry that if they simply give something away for free, then they will miss out on a chance to make money. But in many cases — particularly in technological research — the world does not even yet know that what you are doing could be valuable.
Because you are thinking differently from everyone else, you are often years ahead of whatever potential “market” there may be. For one thing, the surrounding infrastructure required for there to even be a market for what you are doing may not yet exist.
But if you give something away for free, people will start to play with it. They will discover interesting uses for it that you probably wouldn’t have thought of. It will become part of new conversations that otherwise may never have taken place.
At that point, you will have been the person who gave this to the world, which gives you an enormous amount of credibility. Eventually the world will indeed catch up to your idea, and somebody with lots of power and money will throw millions of dollars at it.
Entire teams will then be working on it, trying to build that market before their competitors do. And if you are the person who gave that idea away, way back before there was a market for it, those teams will want to work with you.
So there’s nothing fuzzy about it. In fact it’s a very practical idea: Karma is a boomerang.