One of my favorite books is Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse. The book offers a profound paradigm of reality via two types of games: finite and infinite.
Finite games have a definite beginning and ending. They are played with the goal of winning. A finite game is resolved within the context of its rules, with a winner of the contest being declared and receiving a victory. The rules exist to ensure the game is finite.
Examples are debates, sports, receiving a degree from an educational institution, belonging to a society, or engaging in war. Beginning to participate in a finite game requires conscious thought, and is voluntary; continued participation in a round of the game is involuntary. Even exiting the game early must be provided for by the rules. This may be likened to a zero-sum game (though not all finite games are literally zero sum, in that the sum of positive outcomes can vary).
Infinite games, on the other hand, do not have a knowable beginning or ending. They are played with the goal of continuing play and sometimes with a purpose of bringing more players into the game. An infinite game continues play, for the sake of play. If the game is approaching resolution because of the rules of play, the rules must be changed to allow continued play. The rules exist to ensure the game is infinite. The only known example is life. Beginning to participate in an infinite game may be involuntary, in that it doesn’t require conscious thought. Continuing participation in the current round of game-play is voluntary. “It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely” (p. 4).
Startups in the conventional sense are a finite game. There are defined rules for playing (product, business models) and exiting (IPO, acquisition, bankruptcy), as well as competition.
But this finite game is played within an infinite game of life (in fact, the only infinite game that is) – a game that is full of possibility, surprise and play.
However, we often forget that fact. When we do, we can become obsessed with meeting growth deadlines, stressed out about fundraising, resentful towards our co-workers, or believe that life is not fair if a deal falls through. We forget that we chose to play this game.
In fact, this process of forgetting is what’s called veiling in the FAIG framework:
To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves.
Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.
So every great actor plays their role so convincingly that:
In the proper exercise of such roles we positively believe we are the persons those roles portray. Even more: we make those roles believable to others. I t is in the nature of acting, Shaw said, that we are not to see this woman as Ophelia, but Ophelia as this woman.
Life of a startup is full of surprizes and obstacles, many of which are stressfull and and unpleasant. However, seen from an infinite perspective, surprise is actually a great thing:
A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence.
Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.
Ask yourself: in your ideal world, do you want your startup to work exactly as you would have planned: meet all the goals, do all the right things, and get rich? Do you really?? Or do you love the journey, the intensity, being stretched in different ways, and all the amazing learning that happens along the way?
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition
If you find yourself frustrated with raising money or acquiring customers, remember this little gem:
Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.
What if instead of getting frustrated, we saw the process as a beautiful dance that we engage in?
So next time you find yourself in a feeling of desperation, stress or stuckness – take a deep breath, and remind yourself that you are choosing to play this game. You love the ride, even when the ride is bumpy. Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful:
[infinite players] enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully.
One of the keys of the entrepreneurial mindset is to connect with the infinite player within you. Or to put it in other way [cite]:
You can do what you do seriously, because you must do it, because you must survive to the end, and you are afraid of dying and other consequences. Or, you can do everything you do playfully, always knowing you have a choice, having no need to survive unchanged the way you are, allowing every element of the play to transform you, taking pleasure in every surprise you meet. Those are the differences between finite and infinite players.