Marc Jenkins

Book notes - Finite and Infinite Games

2026-04-22T09:15:32Z

I finally got round to reading Finite and Infinite Games, a book that’s been on my reading list for several years.

Of the hundreds of non-fiction books I’ve read, this is probably the most esoteric and hard to read.

Derek Sivers described it as: “maybe the most abstract book you’ll ever read.”

That said, I’m glad I stuck with it. The core concept is a powerful one that applies to many aspects of life.

The book was published in 1986 by James P. Carse, a professor of religious studies. Some chapters feel dated and read awkwardly.

Here are some of my notes, along with the ideas and concepts I came away with.

There are two kinds of games: finite and infinite.

“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

A finite game has fixed rules, boundaries, and an agreed ending. It is played for the purpose of winning. Think chess, a job interview, or an election.

An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. The purpose is to continue playing the game. Think marriage or relationships, culture and society, or even gardening.

An infinite game can be broken down into a series of finite games.

My initial reaction was an affection for the infinite game. But James Carse doesn’t say infinite games are good and finite games are bad. (Although it’s not that easy to establish what Carse thinks. It’s written more like an academic book or religious scripture. There are no examples or stories or practical applications, which is a shame.)

As I understand it, finite games are fine and necessary. Sometimes you need boundaries, deadlines and clear outcomes. The problem isn’t playing finite games, it’s the lack of awareness that you’re playing a finite game.

Finite and infinite games aren’t opposites to choose between. The skill is holding both. Awarness allows you to be part of both games, as you need them.

“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”

Finite games have rules. Follow the rules and you’re playing the game. While infinite players treat rules and boundaries as material to play with.

“To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence.”

I think the distinction between being playful and frivolous is a powerful one. Finite players are serious, looking for a specified conclusion. While infinite players are playful, allowing for possibility. Playfulness allows for optionality.

“Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.”

Infinite players regard their wins and losses in finite games as continuing play. You don’t “win” in a marriage (the goal is to stay married), just like you don’t “win” in business (the goal is to stay in business).

“To garden is not to engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature.”

I really liked how Carse used gardening as his primary example for infinite play. It’s the infinite game in its purest form: no finish line, just continued cultivation.

Below are a few ways of thinking through finite and infinite games as they apply to my work and life:

Consulting. I’m often hired to help an organisation redesign their website. That’s the finite game: hit a deadline, stick to a budget, hit the project objectives. The infinite game is the relationships between teams, the internal politics, the ability for them to run the website after launch. The consultants job is to dance between both these finite and infinite games.
Sales. Sales can be treated as a finite game: close the deal, hit your monthly targets. It’s transactional and zero-sum. The infinite sales game is about continuing the play: to develop relationships, to build trust, to offer value. It’s not so much about the sale as asking how can I help?
Parenting. Another situation that includes both finite and infinite games. The finite game of getting them ready in the morning for nursery. Or the infinite game of trying to create the environment and conditions for them to flourish.
Learning. Carse himself uses school and the educational system as an example of finite games. You take exams, get a score, and progress on to the next school. In contrast, lifelong learning is an infinite game.

Kevin Kelly on Finite and Infinite Games:

The wisdom held in this brief book now informs most of what I do in life. Its key distinction — that there are two types of games, finite and infinite — resolves my uncertainties about what to do next. Easy: always choose infinite games. The message is appealing because it is deeply cybernetic, yet it’s also genuinely mystical. I get an “aha” every time I return to it.

Simon Sinek wrote a more accessible and business-oriented version of the book, which he credits James P. Carse for the idea, called The Infinite Game. I’ve not read this yet, but expect it’s a much easier read if these ideas sound interesting.

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It’s never been more important to blog

2026-04-01T20:02:05Z

David Bushell just published a banger of post. It really sums up how I've been thinking about personal blogging:

It’s never been more important to blog. There has never been a better time to blog. I will tell you why. We’re being starved for human conversation and authentic voices. What’s more: everyone is trying to take your voice away. Do not opt-out of using it yourself.

And it's not just altruistic, goodness-of-your-heart sharing:

From a purely selfish perspective it’s never been easier to stand out and assert yourself as an authority. When everyone is deferring to the big bullshitter in the cloud your original thoughts are invaluable. Your brain is your biggest asset. Share it with others for mutual benefit.

[...]

Blogging makes you a better professional. No matter how small your audience, someone will eventually stumble upon your blog and it will unblock their path.

Oh how true is this:

A child’s crayon doodle is also lacking refined artistry but we hang it on our fridge because a human made it and that matters. We care and caring has a positive effect on our lives. When you pass human creativity through the slop wringer, or just prompt an incantation, the result is continvoucly morged; a vapid mockery of the input. The garbage out no longer matters, nobody cares, nobody benefits.

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Don’t post project briefs on LinkedIn

2026-03-31T10:16:53Z

Well, yesterday was fun…

I’m working with a charity ahead of a large website redesign. I'm consulting and advising, so won’t be designing and building this particular site. We’re in the process of creating a shortlist of agencies to contact with our project brief.

I naively thought it would be a good idea to post about the project on LinkedIn (with the client’s permission, of course). Perhaps I’d get a few more agencies to add to our shortlist.

In hindsight, what followed was entirely predictable. LinkedIn is a network that exists for the sole purpose of people looking for work, and the project had a reasonable budget. So I shouldn't have been surprised by the result… but I was.

Within 24 hours of posting, it had 289 comments.

I had 399 new connection requests (!!).

28 emails.

I even got 6 WhatsApp messages (all blocked and reported as spam). I didn’t even realise my phone number was accessible.

It really felt like sharks circling after smelling blood.

I should have known better. Lesson learned.

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You don’t need to use AI

2026-03-19T20:26:46Z

There’s a narrative circling that doesn’t sit right with me. That if you're not using AI, you’re being left behind. If you're ignoring AI, you’re an idiot.

My insecure-and-anxious-self agrees: of course we should be paying attention to AI. After all, it’s going to take over all of our jobs. (Which raises the question: if it’s going to take over our jobs, what’s the point of paying attention anyway? But I digress.)

But then my rational-self believes this is bullshit. As soon as someone talks in absolutes, it’s a warning sign that they haven’t thought things through properly.

I think of my friend Dave Smyth who runs a solo design studio. He doesn’t use generative AI, nor does he work with organisations pushing LLMs. He’s working in alignment with his values, and I love and respect that. He knows his skills and experience make the work valuable.

Or I think of someone like Andy Bell, a top-tier frontend developer. He’s not using AI, either. He’s taking a strong stance and talking about it openly.

Or David Bushell, another excellent developer who isn’t using AI for professional work. His AI policy is worth a read.

We were oblivious of the effects of social media in the early days, but now there’s mounting evidence of just how damaging social media is to our health. The negative impacts of social media have been likened to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I believe AI will be considered just as, if not more, dangerous to our health.

I’m convinced we are going to see a mainstream anti-AI movement. Freelancers who stand up and say “I’m proud not to use AI.” And there will be plenty of organisations who feel AI conflicts with their own values and will happily hire these people.

So let me say it here: you don’t need to use AI for your work. The pressure to use AI is coercive, but there are practitioners choosing to resist.

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A breadcrumb trail of awkwardness

2026-03-18T12:10:07Z

I was chatting to a friend recently about personal blogging. He asked something like: don’t you feel embarrassed by some of your older posts?

The answer is – of course – yes. I’m embarrassed about quite a few of them.

Here’s an example. In 2014, in a post called Time I wrote:

I’d consider myself a busy guy. I work hard in my day job and do some freelancing on the side. I regularly cook, do house chores, feed and walk the dog, and visit family and friends.

[...]

That’s exactly why I’m reluctant to ever use the excuse “I don’t have time”. When I’m honest about how I spend my day, it’s clear that I have plenty of time to do the things I want to do. And you have, too.

Oooph, that makes me a little uncomfortable now.

I was clearly in a phase of life where I had free time, but didn’t have the awareness to realise that not everyone has that luxury. There’s a kernel of truth to the post – that you should attempt to make time for the things you really care about – but I don’t think I’d write the post in such a matter-of-fact way now.

I’m in parent-of-a-toddler phase of life right now, while running my own business, attempting to maintain a semblance of a social life, read a mountain of books, indulge in personal hobbies, and so on. It’s deliciously ironic to say these days I don’t have time.

Or how about in 2015, when I wrote this:

There are many introverts who I admire; perhaps none more so than Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.

I just vomited in my mouth. In my defence, this was likely before most of us realised he was a narcissistic psychopath. But I don’t even recognise the person who wrote that. Fuck Elon.

There’s something quite unnatural about sharing your thoughts on the web. It’s uncomfortable hitting publish, for your words to be immortalised.

Writing a personal blog means leaving a breadcrumb trail of awkwardness.

But that’s the point. We can catch ourselves when we’re wrong and change our mind. A post is just a snapshot in time, after all.

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On this day

2026-03-16T08:42:23Z

I’ve been using Day One to capture the little moments of family life. Most days I add a few photos and a sentence or two about what we’ve been up to. Days out, holidays, funny or cute moments, even the mundane everyday stuff.

I have the Day One widget on my home screen which surfaces journal entries from today’s date in previous years.

My homescreen with the Day One widget

I also use daily notes in Obsidian for journalling and use the On This Day plugin to surface entries from previous years.

Inspired by Austin Kleon, I’ve added an “On This Day” to my blog too. Posts published on this date in a previous year will show up below the post.

A few reasons why I enjoy looking back at previous years:

When my daughter was born, friends often advised: be present and enjoy it because this phase doesn’t last long. Which is true – and good advice – but really hard to do when you’re tired and stressed and not really sure if you’re doing things right. Capturing things in Day One and revisiting them later lets me appreciate moments I couldn’t fully take in at the time.
When you read journal entries from previous years, patterns emerge. Sometimes they’re uncannily similar: something I hadn’t thought about in months, yet there it is in an entry from exactly a year ago. Perhaps it’s the seasonality of life, but the patterns are fascinating to observe.
Occasionally I’ll read a previous entry and barely recognise the person who wrote it. It’s a reminder that we’re not fixed, our identities and opinions can and should change.

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Personal blogging

2026-03-10T09:45:04Z

I’ve been disillusioned with social media for a while. But it’s only recently I’ve realised I miss something about the early days of social media: the genuine connections and conversations that used to happen online.

I wrote about leaving Twitter several years ago, in which I said:

I found a full-time job via Twitter. Clients have hired me after finding me on Twitter. I formed a mastermind group with people I met on Twitter. I started a small Slack community primarily with people I met from Twitter. And I’ve made many life-long friends from Twitter.

I still have nostalgia for the early days of Twitter. I felt I got as much out of it as I put in. This of course was before The Algorithm arrived. Twitter, pre-algorithm, was just a chronological list of updates from people I’d opted to follow. These days, what you see is decided by the platform, not by you. The social element is gone.

Algorithms have created an incentive to game the system, to create “content” that gets as many likes or shares as possible, for users to be performative. And with the rise of LLMs, what is posted is often insufferably generic. It should no longer be called social media: it’s anti-social media.

Manu Moreale recently wrote about online counterculture:

The way I see it, the true online counterculture is not to join Mastodon or Bluesky. That’s just a different spice of the rotten experience that’s social media. True online counterculture is rejecting social media altogether.

[...]

Counterculture is sharing things you’re passionate about not because you plan to make a living out of it but because you believe connecting with other human beings is important. Counterculture is forming online bonds with 20 people you get to know over time, rather than amassing hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.

Counterculture is writing a personal blog.

I’ve really come to appreciate RSS and personal blogging as social media replacements. RSS is now my social feed: just a list of really awesome stuff, written by cool and interesting people, waiting to be read. I treat it as a stream, not an inbox to clear. It is far more nourishing than scrolling social feeds.

Personal blogging is the antithesis of what these gamified platforms have become. Blog posts tend to be long-form, thoughtful, personal. There's no algorithm to please, no incentive to game the system or perform in a way that's not you, no draw towards outrage or controversy. It's a place you can be yourself.

It’s worth pausing here to draw a distinction between personal blogging and the kind of blog a business might have. If a company is blogging, it’s usually for a reason: to build a lead pipeline, to establish authority, to become a “thought leader”. These are all fine reasons for publishing, but that’s not personal blogging. Personal blogging isn’t concerned with metrics. It’s concerned with whatever that individual wishes to share, metrics be damned.

As Tom Critchlow so wonderfully put it:

Forget about “visibility” for your post. The unit of blogging isn’t pageviews, it’s conversations.

Which leads me to what I want my personal blog to be.

I’ve long grappled with what to blog about. With so much negativity filling the web, I've often felt the urge to share only positive things. But sometimes my mood is dour and that felt insincere. There’s a lot of shit things happening in the world, and sometimes it’s good to talk about them.

Thus I’ve come to the conclusion that I should stop trying to set boundaries for what my personal blog should be. It should be whatever I want it to be in the moment. It’s more fun, more genuine, more likely to create connection, if I share what’s on my mind.

I want to share more of my private notes. I use Obsidian to maintain a Zettelkasten-like system full of connected ideas. Recently, Dries Buytaert wrote about sharing notes from his own system, and his principle resonated with me: if a note can be public, it should be. If something is useful to me, there’s a good chance it might be useful to someone else too.

I also want to do more riffing. Taking a post someone else has written and responding to it via my own blog. It’s a form of slow thinking, a considered response that encourages conversation. Writing from a place of curiosity, not authority. I’d love to see more of that kind of dialogue happening through blogs, and I want to be part of it.

I’ve been encouraging more friends lately to write a personal blog. I know so many thoughtful people who keep their ideas to themselves, or share them in bite-sized pieces with The Algorithm. The alternative is personal blogging.

There's something freeing about having a space online that’s yours, a space that isn’t beholden to some company’s algorithm or business model. You can do whatever you want with it, and you should.

Personal blogging is more likely to generate interesting conversations with interesting people. That, to me, is the beauty of having your own little corner of the web.

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Slow thinking

2026-02-25T09:16:21Z

Back in 2016, Derek Sivers wrote about being a slow thinker. He explained that when someone asks him a deep question, his immediate response is “I don’t know.” His answer arrives a few days later.

It resonated. I’m a slow thinker too. And it’s the opposite of how most people respond to a question. We’ve been conditioned to give quick answers or confident reframes.

This is particularly true when speaking to clients who have hired us for our expertise. There's an expectation (or maybe it’s pressure I put on myself) that I’ll have all the answers.

Just the other day I was talking with a potential client. They asked a tough question, the kind I felt I should have an answer for on the spot.

I used to scramble around and attempt to say something coherent and intelligible, but really I was just voicing the first thought that came to mind.

Instead, I paused and said: “That’s a good question. Let me think on it and come back to you.”

The answer I provided the next day was better than anything I could have said in the moment. More considered, more useful, more honest.

Saying “I don't know, let me consider that” still makes me uncomfortable. I still feel as if I should have the answers locked and loaded. Pushing past the impulse to respond immediately with whatever comes to mind requires self-confidence and humility.

I’ve come round to the idea that saying “let me think on that” is a way of taking someone’s question seriously. It just requires giving yourself permission to think slowly.

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Book notes: How to Make Sense of Any Mess

2026-02-16T08:58:34Z

I’ve just finished reading How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert. I devoured it in a few sittings and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The book is an introduction to information architecture: “a set of concepts that can help anyone making anything to make sense of messes caused by misinformation, disinformation, not enough, or too much information.”

It was a timely read as I wrestle with a few complex client projects. What follows are a few highlights that resonated.

Knowing is not enough. Knowing too much can encourage us to procrastinate. There’s a certain point when continuing to know at the expense of doing allows the mess to grow further.

I’m working on a project right now where we’ve hit the discovery phase hard: gathering requirements, doing research, interviewing dozens of stakeholders. All that knowledge quickly becomes overwhelming. This is a good reminder: at some point you have to commit to a direction and start making decisions.

Things always change when we begin to understand what we couldn’t make sense of before. As a sensemaker, the most important skill you can learn is to adjust your course to accommodate new forces as you encounter them on your journey.

This is why too much discovery upfront can be damaging. You need to start building, because you’ll learn more as the project progresses. A website redesign is a journey, not a straight line. New insights will emerge along the way, and the most successful projects are the ones that adapt to new information.

It can start to feel like the mess wants you to fail in making sense of it. Don’t worry. That thought has occurred to everyone who has ever tried to change something.

This is so true. The design process is messy.

When we don’t define what good means for our stakeholders and users, we aren’t using language to our advantage. Without a clear understanding of what is good, bad can come out of nowhere.

This feels obvious, but I’ve worked on plenty of projects where “good” was never defined. Everyone assumed they were aligned until they weren’t.

Pretty things can be useless, and ugly things can be useful. Beauty and quality are not always related.

This is a great reminder. Pushing pixels around and getting the visual design just right can be a distraction from the real work.

To determine who matters, ask these questions:
Who’s most important to get agreement from?
Who’s most important to serve?
What words might make them defensive?
What words might put them at ease?
How open are they to change?

These are great questions. Understanding who you’re designing for and who needs to sign things off is critical to making a project successful.

When architecting information, focus on your own unique objectives. You can learn from and borrow from other people. But it’s best to look at their decisions through the lens of your intended outcome.

It’s often tempting to copy what others have done. But what worked for them might not work for you. Always filter other people’s decisions through your own context.

Don’t settle for the first structure you come up with. Take the same things and arrange them, not in one way, but in two or three ways. Compare them. Iterate. Test. Refine. Combine. Change. Argue.

This is a mindset that many teams could benefit from adopting. The design process benefits from iteration, which means you can’t be afraid of making mistakes.

Don’t seek finalization. Trying to make something that will never change can be super frustrating.

Perfection isn’t possible, but progress is.

I’m always trying to remind my clients that a website is never “done”. Launch, learn, and improve.

No one comments on the plumbing or electricity of a building unless the toilet is clogged or the lights aren’t working. Similarly, people don’t compliment or even critique information architecture unless it’s broken.

Don Norman said something similar in The Design of Everyday Things:

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.

Information architecture done well is invisible too. This is what we should strive for.

If you're involved in organising content, I recommend giving this a read. It's short and accessible for people new to information architecture. It's available online to read for free or you can order a copy.

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Blogs I’m reading (via RSS)

2026-02-12T10:37:00Z

A friend recently asked what blogs I subscribe to. I still use RSS daily and, honestly, I prefer it to social media.

Here’s a list of what I’m currently reading. It’s a mix of web, tech, productivity, finance and personal writing.

What great blogs have I missed? Let me know!

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