The Personal Idea Maze
Tuesday, July 25th, 2023
A big part, perhaps the core part, of playing the online game is to have a map.
The problem is, no one is going to make this map for you.
There are trails and bits as you talk to people and watch other people's journeys.
But unlike climbing traditional ladders, there is much more complexity and optionality when trying to discern the map you are traveling upon.
While the actual journey may look more like a map than a ladder for many in retrospect, the process of figuring out the game while playing the game is finding one's way through a maze.
A map sounds a bit more fun and deterministic. After all, once you know which way you are going, you just follow the map.
But online games, especially infinite games, have a maze as the terrain, and that better illustrates the frustration as well as the goals.
The goals are still clear for the person traversing the maze: to get out!
Unfortunately, whether the escape hatch is in the opposite corner from where you start or adjacent is not something we can totally control. So it is with life.
We do make decisions on how we play the games and the kinds of games we play.
But the exit is not ours to determine.
A maze also is not really just the journey. It's a little bit on-the-nose to talk about dead ends and the such for the actual journey.
The personal idea maze, however, is just as important, if not more important.
Many people who are NPC-mode can still navigate a maze.
Either they choose to play a well-trodden game with a maze as common knowledge, or they have no idea and just bump their way around until they get out or stay stuck. To some degree, even those who want to play a different game play that in real life. Life has few mapped out easy streets on the GPS.
However, the personal ideal maze is what sets people apart from those stuck in NPC-mode.
The personal idea maze is seeking what matters.
In my earlier essay, I talked about the key nuggets, level-ups in the game as Inflection Points.
That is what navigating the personal idea maze is: going through ideas, inspiration, distinctions, inceptions and reflections in thinking and ideas to find those meaningful Inflection Points.
It is perhaps one of the hardest things to do, but I think this state of play IS the actual game.
The rest is just execution, habits, luck, energy, relationship building.
But the game one starts to play begins with the end in mind, which doesn't even activate until the personal idea maze is navigated.
Is it an endless maze?
I think there are certainly infinite levels.
But going through the idea maze to reach an unlock, whatever that may be, which should lead to inflection points, is key. Is it accompanied with trying things in public and shipping to get feedback?
Most certainly.
The idea maze without any real world feedback is not only lonely, but is largely a mirage.