Out of Book
Out of Book happens when a move and game in chess has never been played before and recorded. I only recently found out about this concept after listening about it on an episode of Radio Lab. The concept can be applied to many fields and genres. It plays itself out in the most interesting of stories.
There’s the ending of Back to the Future where Doc Brown says “where we’re going we don’t need roads.” There’s the line from Edge of Tomorrow where the main character says “we’ve never gotten this far”. There’s even an episode of Rick and Morty where Rick plays a game called Roy: A Life Well Lived in which he draws a crowd for going off script.
While we were in our startup, unbeknownst to us, we were making a lot of moves that were in book… shareholder agreements, preparing a pitch deck, onboarding staff, etc. However, there were many things that we were working on that were on the cutting edge that no one had done before. That didn’t stop us from thinking that maybe someone had done it already, had the answers, and if we could find them, would turn our work into a paint-by-numbers. We’d be living life on easy street!
Out of book was exillerating, fun, and terrifying. The most interesting work happens there and we should all strive to get to it as quickly as possible. It’s the only way we can make the book bigger.
