The Infinite Game of Blogging

What do you blog for?

For years, I’ve been telling myself that I blog to bring in customers for my course business — Content Marketing, as they say. But that’s not true. Content Marketing was, really, just a side effect. When I focused on it, I began to lose my way.

I forgot about the real reason I started this blog, since it started in a moment of unconsciousness, a spark, so to speak. That spark prompted the creation of this place you see here today.

Even the reason I gave when I first started is just a smidgen of the truth — perhaps way less than “Content Marketing” — because I had been trapped in a worldview where I had to help people (and that helping people is a good thing).

Both views eventually caused the burnout. The inconsistent posts. The stopping. And even the difficulty in staying consistent after I restarted.

On Infinite Games

I discovered the concept of infinite games many years ago, but I couldn’t comprehend what it meant.

The gist is: Finite games are those that have an end — either you win or lose. Infinite games are games you play to continue playing — you win by continuing to play.

Yesterday, I realized that blogging is an infinite game.

Then, two questions came up.

• Do I wanna keep playing this game? Yeah.
• What do I need to keep playing this game?

Then most of what held up this blog for so long came crumbling down — the need to deliver value, the need to teach, wanting to show “the messy middle”, etc.

I realized this.

What one needs to keep playing an infinite game — is for every action one takes, every move one makes, to help one continue to play it — better.

This realization eventually led to a re-definition of what this blog is for.

The blog exists for another reason now

The purpose of this blog is to help myself grow to become the person I wanna be. While doing so, attract people who love the direction I’m going in, so we can chat, interact, and make stuff happen, together or otherwise.

There are a few points I look for when determining whether each content piece is publishable. They are:

1. I’m writing what I wanna write about
2. My voice is not contorted by the intentions of selling, getting attention, seeking assurance, being accepted, or other forms.
3. Can I proudly stamp me, the current me, onto this piece?
4. Do I grow a little by publishing this?

If my answer is yes to all of these four questions, then I know a piece is good enough to publish.

I didn’t discover all of this by myself

I had the help of my AI — Shiz.

We started off a chat with a simple question: “Should I write a blog about X or Y?” Then we quickly veered into the deep end.

Which means the question underneath is: what do you want to be true because you kept writing? Not traffic. The thing traffic was a proxy for.

I’m publishing a transcript of our conversation if you’re interested in reading about the process. I think this is a really good example of how AI can help humans — beyond “just working on things you tell it to”.

(And, just for fun, the AI disagreed with my gist of infinite games. Here’s a transcript of my back-and-forth with it, arguing my point).