Do You View Writing as a Finite Game or an Infinite One?

Finite games have “winners” and “losers”

Photo Credit: Lethu Zimu on Unsplash

Until recently, I viewed writing as a “finite” game: one with winners and losers. Writing superstars with oodles of followers, fans, and shares seemed like the winners. And writers who failed to reach a requisite level of status or acclaim seemed like the losers.

But writing doesn’t work like that.

This concept clicked while I was reading Simon Sinek’s new book, The Infinite Game. Sinek talks about how there are two types of games: finite games and infinite ones.

Finite games feature a winner and a loser. There is an agreed-upon objective and a finite time horizon. A good example is a soccer match. Each side is striving to finish the 90-minute game with more goals than the other side.

Infinite games, on the other hand, do not have defined winners and losers. They don’t even have defined rules, and they are played without a time horizon. Sinek spends the majority of the book discussing why business is an infinite game even though people view it as a finite one.

Image courtesy of the author. Concept from The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.

This concept of finite versus infinite games can play a HUGE role in the way we think about our writing.

Are we writing for short-term gains (likes, claps, followers, partner payouts, etc.) or are we writing for the long haul (because we enjoy it and we want to impact others with what we say)?

Here are a few ways that writers (myself included) have played finite games with our writing:

• Focusing on short-term stats rather than long-term growth
• Publishing low-quality posts to try to make more money
• “Following” others with the hope that they’ll follow us back
• Thinking that one writer’s gain is another writer’s loss
• Refusing to share or clap for another person’s post because we’re jealous of their success or think they’ve “already gotten enough claps”