Impact arenas

I’ve been reflecting on impact as a human need, and how it will become increasingly scarce in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. In the post The Last Finite Resource, I characterized impact as “the number of human brain states changed and by what degree” – meaningful alterations in how other people think, feel, and understand the world.

One mental model we can build on this foundation is impact arenas: the distinct spheres of human activity in which we create ripples of influence. These range from the intimate (family life, close friendships) to the professional (work, academic fields) to the recreational (hobbies, social clubs) to the cultural (music, literature, cinema) to the civic (politics, community organizations).

To be ambitious is to seek impact in some arena. Success, fame, wealth, status – these are all downstream effects of having significantly changed other human minds.

Examples

Consider Anthony Bourdain’s trajectory. His early impact came as executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, operating within the relatively contained impact arena of the New York fine dining scene. He then translated that specialized influence into a new arena – writing – with his memoir Kitchen Confidential. This success propelled him to television and eventually global celebrity that transcended both food and travel.

We can glimpse Bourdain’s perspective on impact arenas from the first episode of his first show, A Cook’s Tour. In Tokyo, reflecting on American dining culture compared to Japan’s, he observes:

For us, restaurants are like gas stations. You pull in, you fill up and you move on, preferably as quickly as possible. The idea of volume is much more important than quality. . . . ‘Hey, did you have a good meal?’ ‘Yeah, they gave you all the shrimp you could eat!’ . . . That’s really silly. You know, bulk. It explains a lot about our culture.

This observation isn’t just about food – it’s about the relative importance of “fine dining” within American culture. In a way, Bourdain is marketing his particular impact arena as something more people should value: we should invest more time thinking about, appreciating, and savoring our meals. There’s an implicit invitation: “this is the impact arena where I’ve chosen to play (where I happen to excel)… come join me here where it matters.”

Now contrast this with bodybuilding YouTuber Scooby1961’s perspective on food. Elaborating on a quote from fitness pioneer Jack LaLanne – “if it tastes good, spit it out” – Scooby declares:

The first thing you need to do is free yourself of this romantic notion that meals are a social event. They are not. They are a bodily function. There is no time in the day for six sit down meals…. [you must also] free yourself of this notion that food must taste good. Food is fuel, not some amusement park ride.

These two influential figures make diametrically opposed claims. As if to continue the (imagined) exchange, Bourdain used the same metaphor in the opposite way!

Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

These public figures have achieved mastery in different impact arenas – fine dining versus fitness – and each is essentially recruiting you to their arena rather than their competitor’s. “Don’t play his game,” they suggest, “play mine instead, where the real value lies.”

I deliberately use the word “arena” because it evokes competition and games. And indeed, as global population stabilizes and artificial intelligence increasingly captures human attention, having meaningful impact will feel more like a zero-sum competition. This competition operates both within arenas (who’s the most influential chef?) and across arenas (is fine dining or fitness culture more worthy of attention?).

Technological reshuffling

Film director Richard Linklater offers a poignant reflection on how technology has diminished his chosen impact arena:

With a changing culture and changing technology, it’s hard to see cinema slipping back into the prominence it once held. I think we could feel it coming on when they started calling films “content” … but that’s what happens when you let tech people take over your industry. It’s hard to imagine indie cinema in particular having the cultural relevance that it did.

And he goes on:

Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain. I think that’s just how we’ve given over our lives, largely, to this thing that depletes the need for curating and filling ourselves up with meaning from art and fictional worlds. That need has been filled up with – let’s face it – advanced delivery systems for advertising.

Linklater recognizes that attention is our scarcest resource. The mindshare we’ve surrendered to social media, streaming content, and digital platforms had to come from somewhere.

Impact arenas grow and contract in relevance as technology and social values evolve: each generation witnesses a dramatic reshuffling of which arenas matter most. Artificial general intelligence promises to accelerate this reshuffling beyond anything we’ve experienced so far.

Strategic arena selection

Philosopher Kwame Appiah observed:

It’s not how well you play the game, it’s deciding which game you want to play.

If you aspire to achieve significant impact during your lifetime, you can choose from two overarching strategies: you can compete within an established arena, or you can identify emerging arenas poised for growth and establish yourself early. With the second approach, even if you’re not immediately recognized as a top player, you’ll be positioned for outsized influence simply by being there first when the arena expands.

Established arenas offer built-in advantages. They have well-developed distribution channels and audience awareness. Consider music: if your song goes viral, you can rapidly impact billions of minds. People already understand what a “song” is and have frictionless ways to consume and share this form of creative expression. Win this competition, and you win big. There are also established techniques and skilled craftsmen you can learn from. But the competition is ferocious, and like Linklater, you might find your chosen arena diminishing in relevance even as you master it.

Most outsized success stories, especially among young people, come from the second strategy: hitching their wagon to nascent impact arenas on steep growth trajectories. Larry Page and Sergey Brin grasped what a website was before most people had ever seen one. They recognized the transformative importance of web search when the concept was still foreign to the mainstream. They built tools that made websites accessible before people fully realized how much they would come to rely on them. Their impact through Google expanded in lockstep with the growth of the web itself.

Similarly, YouTube pioneers like MrBeast and PewDiePie entered an emerging arena early, allowing their influence to compound as the platform itself exploded in cultural significance. A contemporary example of this strategic arena selection is Eric Steinberger, co-founder of magic.dev, an artificial intelligence startup:

When I was 15, I decided I’ll dedicate my career to building superhuman AI… 10 years ago I was a teenager, tried to figure out what is important in my lifetime, after about a year of contemplating and pondering and looking and reading things, it became quite clear that if you could build something smarter than I am, it could do all the things I was considering.

Steinberger made a deliberate arena choice based on his analysis of future importance. Combined with his natural talents, this strategic positioning has placed him, now in his mid-20s, at the forefront of what may become this generation’s defining impact arena.

The downside of emerging arena selection, of course, is prediction risk. These spaces are inherently difficult to identify in advance. Choose poorly, and like Toyota’s massive investment in hydrogen vehicles while the market pivoted decisively toward electric, you might be an expert in a space that never achieves the relevance you anticipated.

Research as arena discovery

Startups, venture capital, and academia function as mechanisms for discovering new impact arenas through systematic exploration.

Artificial intelligence began as a niche field within computer science. Over decades, it has evolved into perhaps the most consequential impact arena of our time, reshaping everything. Early researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun positioned themselves as central players not just by advancing the field, but by actually defining the shape and boundaries of the arena itself.

Similarly, the search for startup product-market fit represents a form of economic frontier research. Secular trends like internet adoption, mobile computing, and cloud infrastructure created fertile conditions for entrepreneurs to discover entirely new problem spaces or revolutionary approaches to existing challenges.

Innovation, novel ideas – these are the precursors to new impact arenas. To most effectively decide which game to play, think like a researcher at the edge of what’s known and what’s possible.

The game of life

The landscape of impact arenas will transform dramatically in a world where AGI can perform most human cognitive labor. Long-standing arenas from translation to medicine to entertainment will be revolutionized faster than we can adapt. In such a world, selecting the right arenas becomes much more important than gaining mastery in any one. What is the value of expertise when artificial agents can do it all?

A skillful response might be to treat impact pursuit more literally as a game – something to engage with seriously and intentionally, but without completely identifying your worth with the outcome. A passage from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet reminds us of this possibility. The narrator, after achieving professional success, visits a childhood friend and experiences an epiphany:

I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that – in good faith, certainly, with affection – I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.

In the end, impact arenas are merely the games we invent to structure our pursuit of meaning. True victory might not be about choosing the right arena or playing it well – but in recognizing the game for what it is. A cosmically insignificant yet beautiful, ephemeral dance of brain states echoing across the void.