Start Playing the Infinite Game

Stop playing finite games if you want to feel fulfilled.

When I first saw this video from my friend Chloe Shih, I was floored. Chloe was able to distill what I've been trying to figure out how to say for years now, but was able to do it in a one-minute video. This is why she has millions of followers across social media platforms, because she's one of the most talented and insightful creators out there.

All my life, I've been playing finite games. I called them hoops that I would jump through, only to get to the other side and find myself unfulfilled. Life seemed like a hamster wheel of jumping through hoop after hoop. Get into the right college. Get the right consulting or investment banking job. Get into the right business school. Get the right corporate job. Get into the right startup. Start your own company. Raise venture capital. And so on and so on. But I realized that I was climbing rung after rung on a ladder to nowhere.

It wasn't until I found a calling that I was personally passionate about that leveraged all of my superpowers, did I realize that I should be focused on the infinite game. It wasn't just about winning. Every accomplishment or win falls under the infinite game of who I want to be and the legacy I want to leave behind. Every investment I make, every film I produce, every talk that I give, is in service to that mission. As Chloe says, it's about ingraining intentions into my identity rather than my outcomes.

When you see life as an infinite game, you focus less on the individual wins and losses. You care less about taking risks and having failures because you see the bigger picture. Because if you play the infinite game from a place of fear or scarcity, then you will only be cheating yourself and holding yourself back. If you pour everything into the infinite game of who you want to be, you can be fearless, because every mistake or failure is a learning experience that prepares you for the next challenge. This shift in mindset allows you to take bigger swings and aim for the fences, instead of conservatively trying to hit singles, because you're afraid you might miss.

Your identity is not made up of all your disparate wins and achievements. You are the sum of your accomplishments, as well as the learnings from your failures. You grow as a person when you challenge yourself and do things that aren’t expected of you. If you are constantly living your life where your life feedback review is “meets expectations,” then you are clearly missing out. You only have one life to live and only so many shots on goal. Who do you want to be? How do you want to be remembered?