Stream2

My approach to entrepreneurship is focused on projects. I didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur by committing to one project and seeing if it succeeded or failed. I committed to being an entrepreneur, meaning I committed to being an entrepreneur even without a project. Another way of saying this is: after I graduated from university, I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I didn’t have a company idea.

Being an entrepreneur without a company is a complete paradox, and this is a big part of the reason that for a long time, even though I was trying my best, I didn’t identify as one. There is something that can be done in this situation however and it comes back to the idea of finite and infinite games. A company is a finite, or at best semi-infinite, game, but it’s not an infinite game. Even empires eventually fall. There are however entrepreneurial pursuits that are infinite games, that can be picked up or gotten into without an idea, and the hope is that eventually they lead to an idea.

If you don’t have an idea for a technology startup you can learn to code. If you don’t have an idea for a book or a blog you can practice journaling. If you don’t have an idea for a song or an album you want to release you can learn an instrument. All of these things, coding, writing, and playing an instrument, can eventually lead to projects that you can try to monetize. The fundamental premise is this: when you have an idea for a project it takes a lot of skill to follow through to completion or monetization. So in the absence of an idea for a project, building those skills is a smart move.

For years I was looking for ideas for projects, but I was also working on my skills in parallel. I was working on my skills so much I started to get really philosophical about them. I noticed that the domain of knowledge for each skill is shaped slightly differently. I.e. in coding you have ifs, fors, and whiles, but in music you have C, D, and E. Not only the basics are different, but the way the basics combine into bigger structures are also different. You can write without a specific idea and land on ideas. You can’t really code unless you have some vision of what you want to build (or at least I haven’t arrived at the idea of coding improvisation yet myself).

Yesterday I arrived at a pretty interesting idea and that’s what inspired this post. For a long time I’ve been aware of the shape of knowledge in skill domains and that they’re all different. In parallel I’ve been working as a software developer. Yesterday I was thinking about how each industry has it’s own software applications and I came upon this realization: that just like the shape of knowledge in any skill domain is different, the shape of knowledge in any software application is also different!

So the takeaway is this: infinite games and finite games are actually really similar. Specific infinite games are varied in the same way that specific finite games are varied. If you don’t have a finite game (i.e. a company, say) that you want to start, but you want to start a company, you can pick up an infinite project (learning to code), and eventually you might realize there wasn’t as much of a difference as you initially thought.

One more idea to end on. If you’re focusing on building skills and working on projects, the money doesn’t matter as much. I realized that regardless of how successful any of my particular projects are, I’m going to spend my whole vocation building skills and working on projects, and that’s the point. Get into the skills and projects and the success will come. That’s my theory anyway!