Redefining Success in Business and Life

It's not necessarily about.

Being competitive or not being competitive. It's about knowing the game that you're in when you're in it. So, for example, if you're up for a job and somebody else is up for a job that is finite, there's a beginning, middle, and end. And there will be a winner and there will be a loser. And you should have a finite mindset in that scenario. Of course, you play to win. However, everybody knows that you have to have a little bit of an infinite mindset in the back of your mind. For example, a gate agent in an airline, we want them to have a finite mindset. We want that plane to leave on time, beginning, middle, and end, done, reset. But we want them to have an infinite mindset. We want them to treat us nicely because they want us to come back again. It's not just one and done. We want to treat our clients with respect. It's not just about doing a good job and getting out of there. There is actually good customer service so that we get hired again or recommended. In other words, we have a sense that, that there's more beyond right now. But it's more about. When you think about the business writ large, right? There is competition in Infinite Game. The truest competitor in Infinite Game is yourself. To say I'm the best ex, you know, in the industry is nonsense because you don't know everybody else. And some people are better at some things and some people are better at others. It's actually a stupid comparison. It's a stupid thing to say. It's. It's empirically not true. But you can strive to be a better version of yourself. How do I do better this year than I did last year? How do I improve my service this year, make it better than it was last year? How to make my leadership better this year than it was last year? How do I improve my tech this year than it was last year? Whatever. The thing is, there's always a constant and intense drive to win, or to improve, rather. But when we say to win, there is no such thing as a finish line. Even annual goals are arbitrary. Like, how do we come up with our annual goals? Here's how we do it. We sit down, we go, so how much business you want to do next year? How about this number? How about this number? Okay, and that's it. That's how you picked your annual goal. And the reason we choose annual is because that's when we pay taxes. Why not 17 months? That seems perfectly legitimate. It's all arbitrary. And so we become fixated about hitting an arbitrary number on an arbitrary date. We are so upset if we miss it and we think we've won something when we hit it. It's nonsense. We have to change our mindset away from thinking like a sporting event and think of it more like lifestyle. Right. Running a business is much more like trying to be healthy. Right. So, for example, what are all the things you have to do to be healthy? Well, you gotta eat right. You gotta exercise. You gotta nurse your personal relationships. You gotta get enough sleep. There's probably 15 other things. It's very hard to do all those things well all the time. What does it take to build a great business? You need great sales. You need great marketing. You need great leadership. You need great people. You actually gotta do the service. It's very hard to do all those things well all the time. But it's a striving. It's a striving, Right? And you can absolutely have arbitrary goals. Right? I want to lose X amount of weight by X date. Great. And you weigh yourself every day. Some days you feel good about yourself, some days you feel bad about yourself. We love metrics. There's nothing wrong with metrics. You can't run a marathon without mile markers. It's actually unnerving. Metrics help us feel like we're making progress. It makes us feel like the work is actually building something.

And it helps us measure speed and distance. That's what metrics do. Speed. And how far has our business gone? How fast are we growing? That's good, right? And let's say you hit your goal, you lose that amount of weight on the right date, you feel great, you celebrate, and then you still have to keep exercising for the rest of your life like you haven't won anything. Yeah, Right.

But what's I think more interesting is what happens if you don't lose the weight by that date. What happens if you miss the goal? You know what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens. In fact, you're way healthier now than you were when you started because you've been doing all the right things to be healthy. You just picked the wrong time and the wrong date. The wrong number on the wrong date. And you can clearly look at the trend that you'll hit it in a month or two. No big deal. Right? And so business is the same way. Which is what's more important in an infinite game is to see the trend data. So we do this all the time. We bonus people because they hit a goal, and we ignore people because we ignored the trend. Right, but we don't know how they hit the goal or if it's going to be able to continue. What's way more important is the trend data, because it means you're building a healthy business. You just picked the wrong date on the wrong time. That's an infinite mindset.