Becoming a Live Player

What happens when you take the Lifer/Stranger idea seriously and try to delineate carefully the domains in which you’re one or the other? There is no definite checklist for figuring this out, but if you don’t have at least a few years and a few failures under your belt, you cannot consider yourself competent in a circle.

When you apply first-principles thinking, you switch from being a cover band that plays someone else’s songs to an artist that does the painstaking work of creating something new. You go from what author James Carse calls a finite player, someone playing within boundaries, to an infinite player, someone playing with boundaries.

But if my role is undefined, or if it’s a social situation where I don’t know people well, or if I attend a gathering where someone else in the room shares my role and the lines are unclear, I have a tendency to fly far from my center both during and after. When this scattering happens, it’s often a clue that I’m living out of my false narrative fe