Want to Keep a Secret? Then, Don't Tell Anybody!

A secret remains a secret until you make someone promise never to reveal it.
Fausto Cercignani

​​by Skip Cohen

I love it when somebody tells me, "I want to share something with you, but you've got to keep it just between us!" I smile and usually say, "If you're really uncomfortable, don't tell me, but be assured nothing ever gets passed on." I'm proud of the fact I've never passed any of those secrets on, but here's my point. 

To start, it's estimated that 68% of the world is on the Internet....that's almost six billion people. That means that just about everybody you know lives in both the analog world and has some level of involvement in social media. The access we have to each other today is virtually unlimited...making the old "grapevine" a super highway of information. 

If you have something private and it would hurt somebody to repeat it, keep your mouth shut and keep it confidential. Every time somebody tells me to "please keep it quiet," I'm probably the 100th person who's been told. Add to the number of people who already heard the big secret before me; we're in an industry notorious for being too inbred!

By inbred, I'm referring to the fact that everybody I know has at least one other company under their belt before whatever they're doing now. Use my own experience as an example. I started working at Polaroid, then Hasselblad, followed by an Internet company and Rangefinder Publishing. At one point in the '80s, at least five people from my Polaroid days worked at Fujifilm. While at Hasselblad, I wound up on the Board of the Center for Creative Photography. Who was the chairman of the board? Peter Wensberg, past VP of Advertising at Polaroid.

Now, take anybody you know in the industry who's got a big secret and decides it's safe to tell just a handful of isolated people. Often, the excuse is needing a "sounding board" to bounce off ideas. Within a day or two, hundreds might know about it, and even more damaging might be the consequences if word got out.

It's like playing the stages of the Kevin Bacon game. Take anybody who's been around for more than ten years in photography, and I'm willing to bet you can connect them to almost anybody else in only three to four stages.

The moral of the story is: Don't share your secrets unless you want them released. And the best way to spread the news in the industry is to just tell somebody, "Please don't tell anybody but…"