# Why I Refused My Proprietary Self > [Adam Hyde](https://github.com/costoffreedom/costoffreedom-book/tree/2206d40f4fbd41d7489de1da00d444b3d56f0f0a/book/appendix/attributions.html#adam-hyde) I find myself, after all this time immersed in free culture, amazed at my holding on to some form of the proprietary way of thinking. Sometimes I have found myself consciously going quite a long way down that path before I stop myself and almost forcibly ask myself “hey! What are you doing?” Some time ago I started a methodology called the Book Sprint. It’s a way to facilitate the production of books in 3-5 days with a group of 6-12 people (or so). It took a long time to hammer out this method. Much financial, personal, and emotional pain to keep going down a road that nobody, including myself, really understood terribly well. Was it really possible to make it work? Well, it took about 4 years of hammering on this methodology, making plenty of mistakes, before I could actually think about it as a methodology. Before I could actually wield it with some form of embryonic artistry, see it in action, build upon it, improve it, teach it to others. 4 years is a long time. It felt like a long time. Truth is, I don’t really know why I didn’t give up, and my stubbornness is something that kind of shocks me, looking back. Suddenly I could see the prospect of a sustainable lifestyle emerging. How would I make it happen and protect it? I had this horrible feeling that I was not good enough at scaling the project and some big ugly org with heaps of cash would scoop in and ‘steal it’. I guess I meant they would swoop in and copy it. The danger of a ripped-off dream caught me off-guard and I went down the road of lawyers and trade mark protection for Book Sprints. This was my first step towards owning the methodology. I look back at that now and I’m kind of amazed I went down that path as far as I did. I didn’t actually follow through with trade-marking. The lawyer told me it was going to cost more and more, and it gave me time to wake myself up. What was I doing? The fear of losing my creation led me down a blinkered “IP” way out of line with my personal politics. It brought me awareness to peel off the layers of proprietary living that transpires our skins. The process is a process of painful personal growth. Sharing my experience with hardened free culture practitioners, I’ve met quick nods of agreement. Only the idealist newcomers look puzzled at my apparent failure: I’m not a true believer. There is no purity on the path to freedom. Walking through the shameful path of not meeting the high bar we’ve set ourselves to avoid proprietary life, I keep learning about how deeply embedded it is in our daily lives. I keep examining it and it keeps surprising me. I keep discarding it. There’s still a long way to go. *Edited by hellekin, 3 Nov 2015, Pourrières, France.* --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://book.costoffreedom.cc/index-2/why-i-refused-my-proprietary-self.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.