- From “The Infinite Game” (Sinek):
- In finite games, like football or chess, the players are known, the rules are fixed, and the endpoint is clear. The winners and losers are easily identified.
- In infinite games, like business or politics or life itself, the players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint.
- I gave James Carse ‘s original book on infinite games a read but I found it very repetitive.
- Approaching an infinite game with an finite mindset leads looks leads to short-sightedness.
- “The score takes care of itself” → infinite
- “We need to make next quarters numbers look good” → finite
- The optimist worldview laid out in The Beginning of Infinity views progress as an infinite game. We play by finding better and better explanations: Optimists view problems as inevitable and soluble and We create better explanations through conjecture, criticism and testing.
- The infinite mindset accepts things about reality that we can’t change like human limitedness (time and power wise). Our relation to reality determines our degree of freedom.
- Maybe the main difference, is that in the infinite game mindset, players recognize that Games are sets of constraints of which participants can opt-out of. Players with a finite game mindset, want the game to end but think they can’t (yet).