Note: These ideas were inspired by Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. It’s a wonderful book to add to your reading list.
Mindset is the frame through which you see the world.
Your beliefs, values, fears, and desires combine to determine your overall mindset, limiting or expanding the possibilities available to you.
Game theory tells us that we can adopt two broad types of mindsets: finite and infinite. The choice you make is critically important because it affects everything that follows downstream.
Everything.
To this end, there’s good news and bad news …
The good news is that the better mindset choice is obvious, and it’s available to you the moment you decide to make it. Re-read that and let it really sink in.
The bad news is we’re constantly encouraged to make the wrong choice. Let’s start by looking at the two mindsets side by side …
A finite mindset applies to games with known players, fixed rules, and an agreed-upon objective. These games have a beginning and an end, and there are winners and losers.
Finite mindsets emphasize competition and comparison to others.
Individual and team sports, competitive games like chess, and other time-bound competition benefit from a finite mindset. When you go out on the baseball field, your goal is to win by scoring more runs than the other team.
An infinite mindset applies to games with known and unknown players, where rules are interchangeable, and the goal is to perpetuate the game.
Infinite games emphasize cooperation vs. competition. Infinite players focus on improving themselves, not beating other players around them …
Many of the ‘games’ we play in life, like marriage, friendships, and business, are infinite games. Players come and go, rules change in context and over time, and the goal of these games is to keep playing (remain happily married, with life-long friends, and in a business you love).
Explaining why he wrote The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek identified several areas of life that are undermined by a finite, win/lose mindset. We don’t ‘win’ relationships, like marriage, for example, and “there’s definitely no such thing as winning business,” he said.
Finite games are based on a win/lose model.
Infinite games create the possibility for everyone involved to win by continuing to play.
The problem is that business has adopted the finite mindset language — ‘beating the competition’, ‘capturing market share’, ‘win at all costs’ — but business is not a finite game.
When we apply the wrong mindset to the game we’re playing, we undermine our hard work.
Let’s apply this distinction between finite and infinite mindsets to our little corner of the world. How do we adopt and apply an infinite mindset to marketing?
First, we only compete with ourselves.
Getting better day after day relative to where we are is the most important metric.
- Improving our skills …
- Delivering better experiences for our customers …
- Creating better products …
- Continuously solving tougher problems that matter to the people we seek to serve …
- Spending more of our time at our best, etc.
An infinite mindset gives us more control because we’re focusing on what we can do right here, right now.
Second, whenever possible, choose cooperation instead of competition.
Business is not a zero-sum game.
It’s easy to be demoralized when we have an idea and realize that dozens of others have had the same idea (and are selling it successfully).
However, lots of sellers mean lots of buyers!
Don’t be scared when you see lots of people in a market that interests you. Get excited. Competition is validation of a thriving market; that money is changing hands to deliver and capture value.
Bring your unique personality and your particular way of seizing opportunities and solving problems to the market and carve out a specific pocket of people you can be a hero to.
Cooperation applies to our customers too.
Get them involved:
- What do they want/need/desire?
- What could you create for a pocket of people that would make their lives demonstrably better?
- What is the problem they don’t even know they have (or solution to a problem they have never considered)?
- How could you enlist their help?
- What could you “co-create” together that creates value for everyone involved?
Third, optimize for long-term value, not short-term gain.
When developing your business strategy and designing your business systems, emphasize decisions that produce long-term, happy, repeat customers.
When you’re playing an infinite game with an infinite mindset, you realize you have all the time you need to get it right. That doesn’t mean it’ll be perfect today. But it can be better today than it was yesterday.
How will your business be better next week?
Next month?
Next year?
What decisions can you make today that will contribute to those improvements? What decisions can you avoid that might undermine those improvements?
For example, maybe that ‘persuasion hack’ you read about yesterday will boost leads or sales this week. Or that fill-in-the-blank, story-based email template will convert a few more leads to customers …
But, at what cost?
What are the long-term consequences to you and your business when you’re relying on hacks and templates?
Play the long game — learn skills, principles, frameworks — and leave the hacks and templates to the finite players. There is no finish line in the game we’re playing.
NEXT: Become a Student of the Game