Playing the infinite game
How my experience of returning to work post maternity leave altered my ambitions + the types of games I want to play
Hello! This essay was originally published in print in issue 2 of Playground magazine in mid-2024. My son Stan had just turned one and I was in the thick of returning to freelance lyf. I’m re-sharing now because the idea of playing the infinite game in a world telling you win! smash it! scale it! despite increasingly adverse conditions for freelance creatives and practitioners, feels pertinent as ever.
My goal is for Broken Growth to be a space for us to explore, interrogate, and reimagine the many faces of growth. The evolution of my approach to work and relationship to success since becoming a parent has, unsurprisingly, been central to my #personalgrowth over the past two years, and I hope it resonates with anyone else navigating a jarring career moment.
Here’s to being in it for the long run and playing many infinite games together.
Matilda
One of the first conversations I had when I returned from maternity leave was on a call with a male startup founder who was looking for marketing support.
“What have you worked on recently, then?”
“I’ve been raising my nine month-old son, actually! I’m just coming back to work, but last year, I worked on several similar projects, which I’d be happy to talk you through.”
“Hmm, okay. We’re looking for someone with more recent experience and results. Thanks, though”.
As a self-employed digital strategist, this was my worst nightmare. You’re a mum, you have no recent experience, you’ve become irrelevant. Goodbye. Shit. I hadn’t even been gone a year. Did things really move that fast?
I was excited to get back to work. Among the moments of pure joy I found the early weeks and months of motherhood monotonous. I was eager to use my brain creatively again and looking forward to spending some time in the sanctuary of work that I knew well and was good at. In one quick intro call, my bubble had been burst. The startup would have been far from a dream client, and they didn’t even want to work together.
I spent the next few weeks frantically networking, taking intro calls and trying to drum up paid work whilst steadily losing confidence. The voice telling me to get a “proper job” grew louder.
Thanks to some amazing people in my network I eventually started to pick up new projects. Now that I was living slightly higher up Maslow’s pyramid and my basic needs were covered, I had space to zoom out on this scramble back to work. I began to see what friends had been telling me: the economy is in a dire state, and the system is hostile to mothers returning to self-employment after having a baby.
As Katie Guild, co-founder of Nugget Savings, a platform helping parents to navigate parental leave, told me: “In the UK, it’s mothers who dare to run a business who suffer most during parental leave. The pay is the lowest and you are banned from working on your business outside of ten measly Keep in Touch days. As anyone who runs a business knows, you can't keep a business going by operating ten days in nine months. The climb back up to running your business at the same level as before you went on maternity leave is not to be underestimated.”
On top of the structural chaos that meant my return to work was never going to be plain sailing, I had also changed irreversibly. I was trying to force myself back into my old mould of working, but I was a different person.
Recent studies have shown that a mother’s brain could be changing for up to six years after childbirth. I don’t doubt it. I feel myself thinking differently to the way I was two years ago. After giving birth to another human, I am more viscerally aware of my own mortality, which has renewed a sense of ‘if not now then when?’ in me. I’m more direct in my communications. I want to simplify work as much as possible in favour of having time to explore new things. I care less about what random people on the internet think of me. I’m more ambitious than ever.
I don’t think that my experience is unique to becoming a parent. Any life-changing experience can jolt you into a new paradigm with a new perspective on the world and sharpen your focus on how you want to move through it.
A quote from James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games was regularly pinned on my Pinterest boards pre-motherhood: “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play”. The sentiment resonated with me but I was only really connecting with the first half of the sentence. After a decade of working in digital marketing to grow (mostly tech) brands online, the idea of playing to win had become deeply ingrained in how I saw the world. Who’d play for the hell of it? We want results!
I am now far more interested in playing the infinite game. My current definition of play is two or more people bouncing energy or ideas around a space, whether that is playing chase in the park, excitedly discussing a new concept via Zoom, or wandering through a gallery with strangers.
Partly through choice and partly through necessity, this sense of play has seeped into my approach to work. I no longer feel boxed into working in the industry I’ve spent most of my working life in. I want to use my knowledge of startup land and the tech industry elsewhere. If I’m building my freelance practice from the ground up again, I want to experience what it’s like to play in new spaces.
Six months after returning to work I feel more confident than ever. I now have some more recent results under my belt but I’m more interested in exploring how we can reimagine the kind of results we’re striving for.
Thanks as always for reading! If you’re in the thick of returning to work, pivoting your work, or simply navigating self employed life atm I see you! You’ve got this.
Playground issue 3 is out now, featuring another essay from me on whether we can break free from social media and stay connected. Buy your copy here.
Stan is such a cute name!!
SO here for playing the infinite game. I feel like the relevance of this piece just compounds over time and I love it 💕