The previous essays painted a bleak picture. A picture filled with stuckness and suckness. A picture filled with many Sagas. A picture purposely painted picture to drive away those that, quite frankly, probably would fail anyway. When you’re playing a finite game, hardships are daunting. In comes my terrible (yet fitting) analogy: it’s like people [...]
The previous essays painted a bleak picture. A picture filled with stuckness and suckness. A picture filled with many Sagas.
A picture purposely painted picture to drive away those that, quite frankly, probably would fail anyway. When you’re playing a finite game, hardships are daunting.
In comes my terrible (yet fitting) analogy: it’s like people that enlist in a military institution — if you don’t have a higher purpose, you won’t last long.
That higher purpose is the basis behind an infinite game—the kind of game you must play if you expect to have any semblance of self dominance. This essay is the first uncovering of the higher purpose.
The closed underpants gnome philosophy
No matter what your goals are now, the vast majority of us end up in this physical world from a desire to look good. That’s just reality.
Wanting to look good can be considered a product. It has an end. It’s a closed underpants gnome philosophy:
- Do a program for six weeks
- Get a six pack
- ????
James Carse would call this a finite game, because it’s a point of conquer. Finite games have an end.
Lose fat, reach your body composition goals, win, done.
Let’s take another look at this.
Telling jokes vs. being funny
Say you wanted to be a comedian. You can pay the funniest dude in the universe to hand over his best three jokes. These three jokes are products. They might be funny, but does that make you a comedian?
To be a good comedian, you have to learn how to be funny, not just have three jokes at your disposal that took no mental effort on your end to assemble. With those jokes, you aren't actually being funny; you're reciting funny.
Those three jokes?
Finite game.
In this video, Jerry Seinfeld talks about refining a joke . . . for years! He talks about shaving syllables off words, and talks about how writing a joke is like writing music. What Seinfeld describes is an infinite game. You can't spend years crafting a joke unless you're in it for the long haul. The infinite game is a forever refining of a craft—being a forever apprentice.
Where the three jokes are a finite product, the infinite game is process.
The process-infinite mindset
There’s a difference between process and product—between infinite and finite. When it comes to self dominance, you have to have a process-infinite mindset.
This is hard to understand because, for the greater part of fitness history, those that were involved were all about the process. They trained for the love of training and tinkered with things to find out what worked. (Can you say, backyard goonie mindset?) Arnold Schwarznegger wasn't’t exactly seen as “normal” in his early days.
Eww, why do that to your body? Why care so much?
Although there’s still stigma floating around, now, more than ever, people are out there trying to change their body . . . only to find out that changing the body isn't easy. That, sometimes, it takes a little bit more than the mindless following of a program.
People are finding out that in order to become funny you have to learn what it takes to become funny, not just holster a few pre-paid jokes.
Fancy that.
Learning.
I think I talked about that before. Learning is tough. Certainly a lot tougher than memorizing a few jokes.
But memorizing isn’t how it’s done unless you plan on paying a coach to hold your hand for the rest of your life. And while that works for a lot of people (even Olympians have coaches!), for most people of the backyard goonie flavor, you’re probably going to have to be a blend of self discovery and outside help.
What are you in it for?
Here’s where you have to stop and ask: what am I trying to do? This philosophical babble of mine comes from a deep place and deep desire to understand my mind and body more than the majority of people that walk the earth every day without even thinking about the two things that make them distinctively human.
There are people out there that might not want to understand things that deep. I get that.
Maybe you only want to know how to change the oil. You might be able to get away with that and be done with it.
But I will say that if that's the only reason you're doing work, you'll have a different mindset than if learning how to change the oil was just one little step in the grand plan to understand the vehicle from front to back and inside out.
If you couldn't tell, I'm the front to back and inside out kind of guy.
What's the purpose of front to back and inside out?
But why? Why does it matter to dig deeper in understanding? You might be wondering these things, especially you're of the “oil change” persuasion.
It seems I’m coming from an “obsessive” place, no? Is it “healthy” to be so interested in all of this?
Some might say no.
In the next essay, I'll let you know what I say.