So an author that radically shifted my worldview,
James Carse,
He had a distinction that I keep coming back to.
He said there were two types of games.
There's finite games and then there's infinite games.
Infinite games,
You play to keep playing.
Finite games,
On the other hand,
They have winners,
They have losers,
They have a scoreboard,
A final whistle.
Infinite games,
They have no finish line.
And the goal isn't to beat the other players.
The goal is to keep the game alive.
It's something you play for your entire life.
Now,
The first mountain,
That's a finite game and you're likely really good at it.
The second mountain,
That's an infinite game.
But here's the thing that no one tells you about winning a finite game.
When you get to the summit.
.
.
The rules require you to come back down and just to play it again.
And at some point,
If you're paying attention.
You notice something.
That mountain,
It looks the same.
It feels the same.
You've been there before.
You've been doing that.
It's that feeling of waking up in the morning and feeling bored doing the same things that used to light you up and that can feel really confusing.
Now that feeling,
It's not a weakness.
That's a signal.
Listening to the signal,
It sounds like a question.
What would I build if no one was watching?
What would I give my energy to if there was no scoreboard?
These questions are uncomfortable because they don't have a KPI.
They require you to sit in the uncertainty and to let something true surface rather than just rushing or pushing to the next move that feels productive.
Now,
The Infinite Game,
To be clear,
It's not soft.
And I want to be clear about that.
It's not sitting down on a meditation cushion up in the mountains.
It's harder than the game that you've been winning,
Because you can't hide behind a metric.
You can't call it a strategy problem when it's actually a meaning or a purpose problem.
So ask yourself this.
What are you building that your children's children will be shaped by?
What do you want to have been true of you when this game is long over?
Now,
These are not retirement questions.
These are right now questions.
And here's what I've come to believe.
All of us,
We have a real calling underneath all the noise that we're sold.
I'm not speaking in hyperbole here.
I've come to see that each of us has an actual specific,
Inconvenient direction that our lives have been pointing to for some time.
But it takes some skill to really see the signs.
And it doesn't announce itself loudly.
Callings are not notifications.
They surface in the quiet between meetings.
They sit in the thing that you keep saying,
Someday about.
Now the machine,
It's not going to encourage you to follow it.
The machine will offer a very attractive finite game full of noise that performs the same emotional function.
It's something to win,
So you don't have to face the harder thing of deciding what you actually want to play for.
Saying no to that takes a lot of courage,
And then acting on what you hear underneath all that,
That takes even more.
So here's the thing.
Winning the first mountain,
That's the finite game,
That built you,
And it gave you discipline,
Capability,
And hard-earned capital that you can do more than most people believe is possible in a lifetime.
It likely also really impressed your parents and your friends.
Now the question is.
.
.
The question is,
What do you want those capabilities to be in service for?
The machine,
That's going to keep marketing and answer.
It will spin remarkable data about your behavior,
About what you need next.
But if you can hold still long enough,
If you can separate what's been sold to you from what's actually true for you.
There is a calling underneath all that noise that has been waiting for you to have exactly this moment in time to take the leap.
