Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

WHAT TO DO WITH SECRETS
If you find a secret, you face a choice: Do you tell anyone? Or do you keep it to
yourself?
It depends on the secret: some are more dangerous than others. As Faust tells
Wagner:
The few who knew what might be learned,
Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show,
And reveal their feelings to the crowd below,
Mankind has always crucified and burned.
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell
everybody everything that you know.
So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s
always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s
a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built
around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy
to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow
conspirator.
As Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings:
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Life is a long journey; the road marked out by the steps of previous travelers
has no end in sight. But later on in the tale, another verse appears:
Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.