Kinetic life is focused on reaching a destination. You harness your drive to complete a journey. In this way of life, it naturally makes sense to find the shortest possible route and take it. Imagine it like a commute. If you were to choose between an express train and a local one, and you saw the world through a kinetic perspective, there would be no point in taking the local train.

Energeial life is focused on experiencing the journey. You treat the process itself as the outcome, and live every moment as a complete one. In this way of life, you live in the present as much as possible. This perspective is less like a commute, and more like a trip. If you were to visit somewhere you’d never been before, and you had a destination in mind—maybe it’s the Victoria Peak in Hong Kong—you wouldn’t just commute to the destination, arrive, and board your return flight. You would take in the sights on the way to your destination, try a couple of local restaurants, pay attention to how life is different there.

Let’s say you set a goal to reach the top of a mountain. From the kinetic perspective, as long as you reach the top, there’s no difference between driving up (or getting helicoptered up), and climbing up yourself. From the energeial perspective, these are completely different experiences.

If you’re living your life in a kinetic way, you are playing a finite game. You win when the game is over and your score is higher.

If you’re living your life in an energeial way, you are playing an infinite game. You win when you get to keep on playing.

Each way also has a different approach to goals. The kinetic way is directly focused on achieving the goal. The energeial way is focused on the process, and you may happen to achieve the goal along the way—or not. 

An author focused with a kinetic perspective might focus on getting their first book deal, getting an MFA, meeting the right people in the industry, hitting the New York Times bestseller list, and reading the books that they sense are societally relevant.

An author with an energeial perspective might focus on living their life, introspect on their experiences, write every day, publish their work with or without the industry, and read the books that they’re genuinely interested in.

I came across these two concepts in The Courage to Be Disliked, and they resonated with me at a very deep, intuitive, level. They are related to finite and infinite games, as well as causal and effectual reasoning.