What it means to live with an infinite mindset
As a high school graduate last year, burdened by the stresses of year 11 and 12, it became so clear how important the ranking system was in all the subjects. For most of us students though this was the pinnacle of our disappointment. The comparison which left you feeling inadequate and never enough. As a driver and motivator to do better, it serves its purpose, pushing you to beat the people around you. And don’t get me wrong, the ranking system is needed and important…but what happens when we take this mindset out of school and into the real world?
There are two types of games: finite and infinite games
Finite games have known players, fixed rules and an agreed upon objective→ soccer, chess and baseball. There is a winner and a loser, and there is a start, middle and end.
Infinite games have known and unknown players, the rules are interchangeable and you can play how you want. The aim is to stay in the game for as long as you can. You can’t win relationships, business, education or life. These are all infinite games.
When you compare the two, finite games are about achievement and winning and infinite games are about advancing something.
What happens if you play an infinite game with a finite mindset?
If you play an infinite game with a finite mindset, you are playing to win. You hear this a lot through the language of people in business and life in general where they talk about beating the competition and being the best… based on what objective, what metric, what timeframe?
Where are finite games useful within the infinite game?
Finite games/ having goals within infinite games are used as metrics to indicate and help people feel like they are making progress. Simon Sinek gives a great example about getting healthy and how you can’t go to the gym for 9 hours and suddenly get healthy. But if you go each day for 20 minutes, you’ll absolutely get into shape, you just don’t know when, it will take more time for some and less for others. You can absolutely have finite goals within the infinite game of getting healthy, but its about the overall long term practice that matters. If you miss the goal, that’s okay, you just keep going. If you do hit it however, you still just have to keep going. This is what makes the game infinite, it doesn’t stop.
So when it comes to high school exams, it can be used as a metric and indicator for yourself. Yes you are competing against others, but your own education as a whole is infinite, and it will continue. When we leave high school there are no winners and losers. The question is, are you still comparing yourself to others, or the person you were yesterday?
“Infinite games are not the absence of finite games, they are the context in which those finite games exist.” – Simon Sinek
Infinite games
The only competitor in an infinite game is ourselves: how do we make our products better this year than they were last year? How do we make our culture better this year than it was last year?
Playing with an infinite mindset is hard. It’s much easier and more fun to play and win short term games. So why should we do it?
This mindset allows you to be fulfilled by the work that you do, and feel joy when you do it. These feelings don’t come from comparison, but from advancement.
“Living an infinite life means to leave the world in better shape than we found it. To leave the companies that we work for in better shape than we started. To leave our families stronger and better capable than they can do without us. So that we can literally live beyond our own lives.” – Simon Sinek
What if we saw our education as an infinite game? We might have a high school ranking system which is an indicator of how we are tracking yes, but what if day by day it was about improving ourselves and just trying to do better and learn more. Wouldn’t that be so much more fulfilling and enjoyable?
Side Note!!
Sustainability and an infinite mindset
The messaging around climate change is very finite oriented. People talk about how we are killing the planet… truth is we’re not… the planet will be fine because it is infinite. All we are doing is killing ourselves… Climate change is just a destruction of our our own species.
Here’s a few links for more on the topic:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=127s&v=KbYzF6Zy5tY (10 min)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V2K4VqkfRaM (54 min)