You remember your schooldays or your early working days? You’d come up with a great idea, start putting it together, maybe even taking it to market, then someone would copy you! How bad was that? How dare they?

Now, you imagine that nobody ever copied you. Why would that be? Because you didn’t do anything worth copying, that’s why! So how does that make you feel now if someone copies you? You should feel honoured and invigorated to keep coming up with new ideas since you’re obviously a person worth copying.

One of my clients and his two siblings bought trust deeds from one of the big merchant banks. Now it so happened that I had prepared a trust deed for their father some years before. When I saw their trust deed I immediately recognised it. So much of it was in my own words and style (even the font was the same) that it was unmistakably copied from the father’s and then changed here and there.

I like that – what a compliment! Especially as I have been told that the lady at the bank who “drafted” their trust deed is an expert in the field.