Flourishing Tree Inspiration Hour, Vol. 3: Play the Infinite Game with Finite Choices

After a long stretch of busyness, the Flourishing Tree team finally enjoyed a long-overdue outing—to Yangcheng Lake, to taste hairy crabs. Light of heart, on the two-hour drive to the lake, we opened up a session of “Flourishing Tree Inspiration Hour” in the car.

Prologue

Carolyn: The biggest inspiration for me today was something Andy said. He said: “When we design family-structure advisory plans for our family clients, we should focus on the process, not the outcome.” This doesn’t mean the outcome doesn’t matter, but that across all the advisory plans we’ve done these past years, whenever we poured all our energy and resources into the process—deep research, building, communication, implementation, and improvement—it brought a beautiful result. And the moment we grew impatient for quick success or slacked off, even a result that looks lovely and correct is hard for the client to accept.

Joyce: Some recent experiences and study have also led me to think deeply about the meaning of life. Though the meaning of life seems like an empty goal, it can land in the practice of “living in the present.” Living in the present is focusing on the process.

Richard: I couldn’t agree more. In the family-office and wealth-management field, the past sales-driven model of wealth management focused on outcome over process: the wealth adviser treated a successful sale as the outcome, so the entire process revolved around how to sell the product better—producing over-marketing and a poor client experience. But if you are truly oriented toward the client’s interests, working deeply to solve for and realize the family goals of “wealth secure, people happy, family enduring,” it must be a process of co-creation and co-building with the client—and it must focus on the process in order to reach the outcome.

Andy: This reminds me of the pair of concepts, “finite games” and “infinite games.” If we care only about outcomes, we are like players in a finite game—brief and unsustainable, hemmed in by many worldly standards such as money, fame, and status, which will challenge and erode our founding intention (to stay forever loyal to the client’s interests, and to realize for them the family goals of wealth secure, people happy, family enduring). But focusing on the process brings us into an infinite game, letting us treat every task before us with the attitude and mission of “creating a beautiful work in the spirit of a craftsman,” and inviting our clients to enter this process together with us. This is the greatest value we can create for a client.

Richard: I’ve also read the book Finite and Infinite Games; it gave me great inspiration and insight. Let me expand on this concept…

Play the Infinite Game with Finite Choices

The greatest problem we face is not that we have too few choices, but too many.

Buffett is a recognized master of investing, and in investing he has always stressed making finite choices.

Teaching at a business school, Buffett said: “I could improve your ultimate financial situation with a single punch card. This card has 20 slots, so you get only 20 punches—representing all the investments you can make in a lifetime. Once you’ve used up the card, you can never invest again. Under such a rule, you would truly weigh what you do; you would have to put big money into the projects you really want. And your performance would be far better.”

Buffett believes that not only investing but also life goals should be a matter of finite choices.

Once, Buffett’s private pilot, Mike, was discussing his career goals with him, and Buffett had him do the following exercise.

First, Buffett had Mike write down the 25 most important goals of his career. Then Buffett had him look over the list and circle the 5 he thought most important. Mike did so.

Mike now had two lists. One was the 5 goals he considered most important to his career, and the other was the remaining 20 things he also thought fairly important.

Buffett asked Mike: Do you know what to do now?

Mike answered: I do. I’ll start working on these 5 goals right away. As for the other 20, they aren’t as urgent, so I can get to them in my spare time and gradually realize them.

After listening, Buffett said: No, Mike, you’ve got it wrong. Those goals you didn’t circle are not the things you should slowly get to in your spare time—they are the things you should try your hardest to avoid. Avoid them like the plague; spend no time or attention on them whatsoever.

There’s a passage from Jobs I love very much. He said:

“Remembering that you will soon be dead” is the most important maxim I’ve encountered in my life. It has helped me point out the important choices in life. Because almost everything—all honors, all pride, all fear of embarrassment and failure—falls away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Sometimes you worry that you’ll lose something; “remembering that you will soon be dead” is the best way I know to avoid such thoughts. You are already naked; there is no reason not to follow the voice of your own heart.

When you live every day as if it were the last of your life, you will surely rethink how to arrange today’s work and life, how to spend every minute and second of today, and who and what truly matter most in your life.

So how can we make the right finite choices?

Let’s look at the second habit Stephen Covey describes in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “Begin with the End in Mind.”

Dr. Covey holds that everything is created twice:

The first is the process of thinking and planning in the mind—the mental level.

The second is the process of putting that thinking and planning into practice—the practical level.

It’s like building a beautiful house: if you think about nothing and just start building, you may not manage to build the house at all, let alone a beautiful one.

The best way is to picture, before building, the house you imagine—thinking through the foundational design, the structural design, the facade design, the landscaping, and the interior design. This is the first creation.

The second creation is the process of building the house, making detailed adjustments and optimizations according to the blueprints drawn in advance.

To do something well, only by thinking it through before acting can you avoid many detours. Of course, “thinking it through” stresses more the “why” than the “how”; the doing may involve many updates, but the goal still holds its guiding significance.

This is a way of thinking about life, and also an attitude and method for handling matters as they arise.

Before doing something, first ask yourself what result you want, and what you must do to get that result. This way, you may reach a better outcome.

Only when you hold the “end” in mind do you know how to “begin”—and this is beginning with the end in mind.

Taking “begin with the end in mind” as a principle can better help us make the right finite choices.

Once we have made our finite choices, how should we “play” this game of life?

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A finite game aims at winning; an infinite game aims at keeping the game going forever. A finite game is played within boundaries; an infinite game plays with the boundaries themselves. A finite game has a definite beginning and end and specific winners, and rules exist to ensure the game proceeds properly and can come to an end. An infinite game has neither a clear beginning nor end, nor any winners; its purpose is to bring more people into the game itself, so as to keep the game going.

Those who scheme and maneuver for titles, power, money, and status are playing a finite game.

And those who shine in human history—the writers, scientists, artists—are all great players of the infinite game.

When you stand at a crossroads of life, lost, not knowing how to make the next choice, it’s very simple: make finite choices, and play the infinite game.

We will not be scheming actors, following a fixed script. We will be joyful poets, embracing every possibility, savoring every surprise. This game goes on forever; it has no end.

Coda

Yangcheng Lake was now near at hand, and our discussion and sharing drew toward their close. Outside the car, night had fallen; a bright moon lit the sky. And what moved us even more were a few stars in the night sky that, undaunted by the moon’s radiance and refusing to hide, stubbornly twinkled with their own faint light.

The reflection that “Flourishing Tree Inspiration Hour” brings us is like that scattered starlight, lighting the road ahead for the few of us as we travel on.