Don’t Mistake the Milestone for the Meaning

When my first business failed, it felt like the end.

I poured my savings, years of effort, and even my identity into it, forging myself as a social entrepreneur who would change the world. My vision was grand: help millions of people transition to a plant-based diet, save millions of animals, and make a fortune along the way. Instead, I found myself nearly bankrupt, exhausted, and adrift.

In the silence that followed, I kept asking myself: what’s next?

Around this time, I picked up Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game. It shifted something fundamental in me. For years, I had been chasing finite wins like launching the company and hitting revenue targets, imagining a clean narrative arc where, upon achieving success, I would make it. I would finally be someone.

But, I realised, life doesn’t work that way. There is no endgame. Achieving (or failing to achieve) our goals doesn’t mean we’ve ‘made it’. We adapt to achievement, then move the goalpost somewhere else, chasing the next shiny thing. The goals we set ourselves are finite games. Life itself is the infinite game. The “goal” of life isn’t to arrive somewhere once and for all. It’s to keep playing, keep growing, and keep contributing until we can no longer play.

Once I realised that my life was an infinite game, I changed how I thought about everything. The question became: what enables me to stay in the game? The answer wasn’t a new business plan or a better five-year strategy. It was my systems and habits like meditation, journaling, exercise and eating nutritious meals. Small daily acts that sustained me. They weren’t checkboxes on the road to a goal, they were daily behaviours that strengthened my body and mind, helping me play the game every day, day after day. Infinite games require rhythms, not trophies. A strong body. A sharp and resilient mind. A practice that sustains.

That doesn’t mean finite games are pointless. On the contrary: we need goals. They give us structure, motivation, and direction. But the key here is to remember that they’re milestones within the larger infinite frame. Writing a book is a finite achievement; being a writer is infinite play. Completing a marathon is finite; living a life of strength and health is infinite.

The trap is mistaking the milestone with the meaning.

The unpleasant collapse of my business taught me that no single achievement (or failure) will ever be the “end”. The only end is death. Until then, we keep playing the game. If life is an infinite game, then the task isn’t to arrive. It’s to endure, to adapt, and to build the systems that let us keep playing with purpose for as long as we can.

So, dear reader, reflect on this: what allows you to keep showing up? How do you ensure that you keep at it tomorrow, and the days, months and years after? I’d love to hear about it.

Until next week,

Ric.