Playing “infinite games” in life

`0:17:25`

very short. It espouses, you want to be playing infinite games to be happy in life, games that never end versus games like, I'm going to build a business and sell it. Or, I'm going to go public, that's my goal. Or, I want to achieve this promotion. You get most joy out of things that never end, like building great relationships, building a company you want to keep working at forever. I like that. What's interesting is, I've always thought of my career this way. When I got my first job, I was 13. I worked in a grocery store for a bit, and then I worked in a shoe store. After that, maybe when I was 15, I got a resellers license, which was this thing... This is way back in the day. I think they still exists. A company called Ingram Micro D, which had this huge thick catalog of electronics equipment. If you had a resellers license, you could buy these things at wholesale prices, then

`0:18:14`

I could sell them to my friends for retail, which is almost 2x wholesale. Even though I'm not selling electronics equipment today, I'm selling software instead, I feel like I have the exact same job as I did when I was 15, that this is a long continuum of finding stuff that I like. In this case today, it's building things that I like, and selling them to like-minded people who also would find them useful or those things too. So whether or not it's software, or electronics, or stereo equipment, or whatever the heck it is, or music organizing databases, it's all the same to me, and I just want to keep doing it. This is my day job. The other thing that's interesting about entrepreneurship is, sometimes there's a sense of, you can get a job or you can be an entrepreneur. Well, an entrepreneur is a job.

`0:19:01`

This is my job, so I want to create the company that I want to work at, and I want to keep doing this job for as long as I can. As long as I'm useful, I'm good at it, I enjoy it, I want to keep doing that. So to get in bed with an investment that would say, "In five years you have to stop doing what you're doing, you're going to get a big paycheck maybe, but you got to stop doing what you're doing because we're going to sell this business, and you're going to have to go work for this other company for two years and do their thing. Then eventually, after that's over, you'll leave and you'll go start another thing," that just has no appeal to me at all. I'd rather just keep doing the thing that I'm enjoying doing, as long as I can continue to make it work. What's cool about having a company like ours, which is an independent business, we don't have to ask anyone for permission. No one can tell us no. So we can turn this into anything we want.