Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here.

💡 The Big Idea: Playing to Play vs. Playing to Win

I love me a good quote.

I’ve got a whole collection of them inside my Obsidian vault. And the other day, I came across a doozy by Rick Rubin (author of The Creative Act):

When I heard that, it kind of stopped me in my tracks.

Because I think most of the PKM advice out there quietly trains us to do the opposite.

The Playing to Win Trap

Any time you find yourself focusing on the outcome instead of the process, you are playing to win.

Here are some examples:

• You capture a quote from a book and immediately feel the tug of “what am I going to do with this?”
• You tinker with a new workflow, and the first question you ask is “how will this make me more productive?”
• You feel vaguely guilty for the hour you spent going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about Mars terraforming.

The tricky part is that if you care at all about doing more of what matters, you kinda naturally get pulled in this direction.

Eventually, your vault stops being a playground and transforms into a factory. Every note is raw material. Every writing session is in service of some published output.

And you stop having fun. The emotional texture of the whole thing shifts from curiosity to obligation.

That shift is what actually breaks most PKM systems.

Not the wrong folder structure. Not a messy tagging strategy. Not the fact that you haven’t found the right plugin.

The reason people bounce between Notion and Obsidian and Roam and Apple Notes isn’t that the tools are broken. It’s because they’ve created an impossible standard they feel compelled to live up to, and their PKM system can’t keep up.

They’re playing to win, not playing to play.

What Rubin Actually Means

When Rick Rubin says “play to play,” he’s not making an argument against ambition. He’s not telling you to stop caring about your work.

He’s saying that the best work comes from people who’d be doing it whether anyone was watching or not.

The musician who’d still be playing guitar if they never got a record deal. The writer who’d still be writing if they never got published. The developer who’d still be tinkering with side projects at 11pm if no one ever saw their app.

They’re not performing. They’re playing.

They love what they’re doing, and they’re having fun.

That’s the attitude that we need, and that requires us to embrace the mindset of an amateur.

We use the term “amateur” today as a polite put-down. Amateur hour. Rank amateur. Amateur mistake. The implication is always the same: you’re not good enough yet. You’re not serious enough yet. You’re not a professional.

But the word “amateur” actually comes from the Latin amator, which translates to lover. So an amateur isn’t someone who isn’t good at something. It’s someone who loves what they do, who plays for the love of the game.

Somewhere along the way, we turned it into an insult when we decided that being paid for something was the true mark of legitimacy.

The original meaning was the exact opposite of dismissive. An amateur was someone in pursuit of a thing because they couldn’t help it.

That’s the person Rubin is talking about. And that’s the way we need to think about our PKM system.

The PKM Playground

If you take that frame seriously, your PKM system isn’t about maximizing your creative output. It’s not about cranking more widgets.

It’s about playing with your ideas.

It’s a workshop, not a factory. A studio, not a stage. A place where things exist and happen that don’t have to justify themselves.

Your notes don’t have to become anything. You can capture a quote because it hit you, not because you’ve already plotted how it’ll land in a future article. You can build something because you want to see what it looks like, not because it’ll save you eleven minutes next Tuesday. You can follow a link to a link to a link and have the whole evening disappear into some topic you’ll never monetize.

What would you capture if no one were watching? If there were no newsletter, no YouTube channel, no “content engine”? That’s the amateur’s question. And the answer is usually more interesting than what you’re capturing now.

The Amateur Advantage

So here’s the paradox, and it’s a real one:

The people who play to play tend to outproduce the people who play to win. The amateurs, in the original sense, often end up doing the best professional work.

Not despite the lack of output pressure, but because of it.

Richard Feynman approached physics like it was a game. He’s on the shortlist of the best physicists of the twentieth century. Rick Rubin works with the biggest musicians in the world and talks about his job like a kid talking about their favorite hobby.

The best PKM creators I know — the people whose vaults I actually want to look inside — all have this endearing quality. They’re nerds about their notes. They’d be doing it anyway.

You don’t get better at PKM by being more professional about it. You get better by getting more genuinely interested in what you’re collecting. By following the threads that pull at you instead of the ones you think you should be following.

The advantage isn’t despite the play. The advantage is the play.

The Bottom Line: Be an Amateur

Most productivity advice is training you to become a better professional about your notes. My desire with this newsletter is to do the opposite.

The goal isn’t to build a more efficient knowledge management system. The goal is to stay in love with your own curiosity long enough that the system becomes worth having.

Your notes & ideas don’t need a better production strategy. They simply need you to care about them.

So ask yourself:

Are you using your PKM system to think, or are you using it to perform?

Stop keeping score. Capture the thing that resonates with you, not the things you think you can use.

Collect the quotes. Build the dashboard just for funsies. Stay curious. See how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Play to play, not to win.

— Mike