Confused - Duplicate content

Indeed ... exactly so. Syndicated content isn't duplicate content.

And the same thing works the other way round, too: when you put previously unpublished content on your site first and have it indexed there, wherever else you subsequently submit/publish/syndicate the identical material (this is what article marketers typically do), it won't do your own site any damage at all. Similarly, the value of the backlinks you get from doing that, in each case, of course, is exactly the same whether the content to which it's attached is identical, slightly different, or indeed very different from what was previously published elsewhere, and altering/re-writing the content will never improve the link-juice of the backlinks. Syndicated content isn't duplicate content.

There's a lot of confusion about duplicate content online. Most of it's propagated and perpetuated by ...

(i) people promoting spinning software, who clearly have a financial incentive for others not quite to understand that what they're offering is for the most part a "solution" to a problem that doesn't really exist;

(ii) people who have their own emotional investment in believing the duplicate content myth, because they've believed it for so long that it would (understandably) be pretty uncomfortable for them to decide that they'd always been misguided about it, so they're often not too keen on examining the evidence;

(iii) people who haven't quite appreciated the essential and very fundamental difference between duplicate content and syndicated content.