Why do we all hide where our work really comes from?

Watch a pitch meeting closely. Someone presents work everyone in the room recognizes — the shape of it, the borrowed gesture — and still says, this came from nowhere. No one corrects them. Everyone simply grows a little less certain what to trust. The fear underneath is small and specific: that credit is a fixed amount, and naming a debt means paying it out of your own share. So the lineage gets folded away, quietly, the way one folds away a letter before guests arrive. But the work does not read as more original for the silence. It reads as thinner. A pod that cannot say where its ideas began cannot say, either, what it truly added — and that is the part worth being seen for.