The Infinite Game Goal Audit
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Gawdat splits games into finite ones, which have a target, a destination and a win, and infinite ones, which are played for as long as you are playing. Pac-Man is the model: almost nobody checks the score, because the purpose of Pac-Man is to play Pac-Man. Life is infinite — the only finite bit is dying — so the target is to play, not to achieve. From this he builds an audit for any ambitious goal: ask why until the secondary, ego-driven motives surface, check whether hitting the goal actually delivers what you believe it will, and look for an easier path to the same underlying want. Then restate the goal as something you play rather than something you win.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Classify the goal as finite or infinite
Does it have a defined win condition, or is it an activity you want to keep doing? A New York Times bestseller list placement is finite. Writing is infinite. Gawdat's claim is that most of the goals producing misery are finite targets bolted onto infinite activities.
- 2
Ask why, and accept the flattering first answer
The first answer is almost always noble — 'it will impact more people'. Gawdat says the brain is telling you that you are god and can make a difference at scale, which is genuinely the byproduct of playing the infinite game well. Note it and keep going.
- 3
Keep asking until the secondary motives surface
Underneath sit the targets people do not volunteer: royalties, revenue streams, a course to sell about how to do the thing, fame. Gawdat names these without judgement — they are secondary objectives, and the audit only works once they are visible.
Pro tip Write them down as a list rather than arguing with them. Unnamed motives still steer the work.
- 4
Test whether the goal actually delivers what you think
If the reason is 'I'll be well known', check whether you are already well known. If it is sales, check the base rate — Gawdat estimates fewer than about fifteen hundred books ever have sold over a million copies, including the Bible and Harry Potter. Many finite goals do not deliver their stated benefit.
- 5
Look for an easier path to the same underlying want
Ask whether this is the only route, and whether another one gets you most of what you actually want more enjoyably — a hundred thousand readers reached a different way, for instance.
- 6
Restate the goal as something you play
Replace the destination with the activity: write a book you are proud of and enjoy the journey. Gawdat writes at least two and a half times more books than he publishes and does not care, because the exploration, research and conversations are the return.
Pro tip Test the restated goal by feel — the right version produces calm when you sit down to work, not dread.
Watch out Deadline-driven, ink-on-paper writing produces, in his words, a crappy book, because the target stops being exploration.
In the wild
Ali described the book he was writing and the classic accolade attached to it: a New York Times bestseller placement. But when he sat down to write with that in mind it felt demotivating, because the outcome sits outside his control. Reframed as 'write a book I'm proud of and enjoy the journey', he felt the parasympathetic calm instead of the sympathetic activation. Gawdat ran the why-ladder on it live: impact first, then royalties, revenue streams, a course about writing a book. Then the reality check — Ali already has three million followers, so the fame rationale was already satisfied.
→ The ambitious finite goal was demoted to 'nice if it happens' and the infinite version became the working target.
Gawdat says he sometimes wakes and writes for three, four, five hours, then looks at the output and concludes he has no use for it. He wrote it anyway. He loved the journey of writing, the exploration, the analysis, the research, the conversation with a friend to check whether it made sense. Those are hours of his life filled with joy, and they are not wasted by failing to become a product. Had he instead told himself to ship a book in six weeks and stop wasting hours, the result would have been a worse book — because the target would have been ink on paper rather than discovery.
→ Higher output quality and enjoyment from removing the destination, not adding discipline.
Common mistakes
Stopping the why-ladder at the noble answer
'It will impact more people' is true and also incomplete. If you stop there, the secondary motives — money, status, a product to sell — keep driving decisions invisibly, and you will not notice when the goal has stopped serving the thing you said you cared about.
Attaching a score to an infinite game
Nobody checks their Pac-Man score, and the moment you check life's, the activity becomes a means. Gawdat's observation is that for highly engaged modern people, removing the target is what makes everything become enjoyable again.
Assuming the finite goal is the only path
The audit's cheapest win is asking whether another route gets you the same underlying want more easily. People skip it because the famous accolade is the only path they have seen named, not because it is the only one available.
From the transcript
“but if life is a game there are two types of games that are defined one is an infinite game and the other is a…”
“i do a very simple exercise i ask myself why”
“life is an infinite game because the the the finite bit of it is when you die and you're no longer playing”
From the episode
The Happiness Expert Making 1 Billion People Happier - Mo Gawdat
Mo Gawdat