I don’t believe like some do that ideas are out there floating in the ether—that if you don’t use an idea that comes to you, someone else will. Sure, multiple discovery is a thing, but it seems to be a rare phenomenon. That being said, I have had ideas that I slept on, and songs I never finished and recorded, to find that a couple of years later, someone else has just released something similar. My opa was an engineer, and he maintained that he conceptualized a magnetic levitation train, but someone else just beat him to patent it. He kept his original sketches to show his family.

There is nothing truly lost when someone else happens to have the same idea as you, except ego. The idea is still available to you too, and—what’s more—to everyone who now hears it. But if you want to keep yourself from haters who will say that you copped the idea from so-and-so who has more notoriety, record and share your ideas. Show them the receipts. The problem is, you will need to have already done this before it is required of you, and the best time to start recording and sharing your ideas is now.

Now imagine you’re a teacher. If your student has just reinvented the maglev unawares, would you not be proud of them? It shows the promise of such a student’s connection to their imagination. So don’t be hard on yourself when you realize, shit, someone else has already written that melody, huh? Smile to your inner student, give yourself the bad news, and then tell yourself to keep up the amazing work. And if you know you just can’t let the idea go and are that concerned about ownership and copyright, change it or try to improve upon it enough to “make it your own.”

Someone once wrote me about a song of mine, “You must have some balls giving your song the same name as a David Bowie song.” Though I could do without the mental image of them imagining what kind of genitalia they think I have, I heard the sincerity of their compliment, especially because I didn’t know about this David Bowie song. I took it as them saying, hey, your song isn’t completely overshadowed by Bowie’s of the same name. So once I had familiarized myself with it, to pay him homage, I opted to slightly change my song title.

If you keep creating, you will eventually find out someone else has had a similar thought, and that’s the beauty of sharing art. The genius of the monkey who types for eternity is not that it one day accidentally rewrites all of Shakespeare’s catalog, but that it has written several more likely probabilities before then, perhaps like, “For sale: baby shoes, never used,” and other short texts that we might find more or less fascinating for a monkey. But what is truly amazing about the monkey’s output is the literal mountain of work it has done up until that point.

When I consider this, nothing is new under the sun. The cult of originality is a sham. Corita Kent says the only rule is work. The work speaks for itself. The work exists and can be experienced. But “original” is just a concept and an imprecise measurement, too: creators are innocent until proven guilty when it comes to plagiarism, which is good, but few are ever rewarded the honor of being called “original,” which sets a double standard. W. H. Auden says, “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”

So do try to share each good idea, and don’t wait until you can perfectly execute it, because you may not know when you or others could use such a thing. If you strike gold and someone else happens upon it too, if you are humble and don’t need all the glory, you can see that you two are comrades in arts. And to the one who was late to the patent office, may you now have the pride of being an inventor whose invention is honored, even if you yourself are not honored.

But to the one who was first, consider the case of Joe Satriani vs. Coldplay in the battle for royalties over “Viva La Vida.” If anything, the visibility of the litigation lost both of them some public esteem. The prevailing thought at the time was that whoever wins, both parties might as well just be greedy. And even if Satriani could have won (the case was dismissed), was he really that concerned with fame? Was he out to prove that Coldplay is envious of his music? (Weird flex.) In the end, everyone knows “Viva La Vida” much better than his song. Pride goes before the fall.

Still, a more sinister kind of pride is that which convinces us to wait and wait and wait until the perfect moment to realize and share the idea or that we can share our ideas perfectly at all. So just get them out there, for your sake and others’.