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Simon sinek7/1/2023 Ahead days and behind days are temporary. Sinek credits Carse with changing the way he thinks about time: “I don’t have good days and bad days anymore. Instead of racing against the clock to meet arbitrary projections, you’re more likely to keep your eye on your long term goals. The biggest impact of seeing your life and work as an infinite game is that it changes your approach to time. We no longer look at other people as a means to an end-as a cost on the balance sheet-but as a renewable resource that we want to nurture and develop. Adopting what Sinek calls an “infinite mindset” is a matter of individual choice, for people and for organizations, but to be infinitely minded changes the nature of relationships from transactional to appreciative. The game of life that interested Carse, and now Sinek, is one where our participation matters-it’s social and collaborative. (it is literally classified as a zero-player game!) Conway’s is an infinite game, but one without a role for players. The other is mathematician John Conway’s computerized cellular automaton from 1970 that spawned the field of artificial life which thrives to this day. One is Milton Bradley’ s original board game, circa 1860, an enjoyable but altogether finite game. The game of life has two very different associations. Where economists-and most actual game players-make use of finite games with definite rules and time frames, the players of the infinite game play with the rules to extend its duration.Ĭarse, who died in September at age 87, ended his book ponderously, “There is only one infinite game.” When I asked Sinek earlier that month what he thought Carse meant, he said, “I think he’s probably talking about life.” It’s poignant now that I can’t ask him myself, but I suspected as much. Carse’s genius was to transpose game theory from its mechanistic concern with economic motivations to a more philosophical exploration of what it means to be human. This may sound philosophical (it is) but Sinek casts this idea in a practical business context, updating James Carse, the author of the influential and aphoristic Finite and Infinite Games from 1986. Instead, it’s a form of play that seeks only to continue itself. But the kind of game that writer Simon Sinek describes in his new book, The Infinite Game, is not at all about backstabbing or time-wasting. If I tell you someone is playing a game at work, you might think they’re being manipulative, or that they’re actually playing Candy Crush on their phone.
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