The “quantum long game”

Some things seem just too strange to dismiss to coincidence.

Years ago, my wife and I discovered that our great-grandparents had lived across the street from each other in Lower Manhattan. Not just in the same city — but quite literally in buildings facing one another, a hundred years before we met. Her family eventually left New York in the 1980s, and she was born in California, 3,000 miles away. I was raised outside New York. Our families may have crossed paths a century ago, but our lives seemed destined never to intersect.

And yet — on March 25, 2006, on her 20th birthday, we met in a dimly lit bar on Thompson Street, just ten blocks from where our great-grandparents once lived. As if the story had been waiting for us to catch up. As if the lines had been converging all along.

We fell in love. Years later, we married. Then two became three — our daughter, Beatrice. And three became four — Isabel, her sister.

The pattern continues. The story carries on.

Relationships, I’ve come to believe, are the ultimate creative act: two disparate strands of matter, joined across time, forming something entirely new. And in the lives of our children, the pattern continues. The wave becomes form. The story continues its long arc through another generation.

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Lately, I’ve found myself returning to this strange coincidence, tracing its contours like a thread in a larger tapestry. It has pulled me into deeper reflection — on time, on connection, and on the hidden patterns that shape the arc of a life. I’m on a journey to understand what truly endures — what can outlast.

And here’s where I’ve landed: If we want to build things that last — companies, books, relationships, ideas — we need a different framework for time. Not as a straight line, but as a wave. Not just cause and effect, but resonance and return. As the physicist David Bohm once wrote, “Everything is enfolded into everything.” The world, and our experience of it, may not be a series of discrete events, but a flowing totality — a deeper order that connects us in ways we can sense, but rarely explain.

Entangled lives

I’m not a quantum physicist. Just someone on a journey to understand what quantum physics can teach us about life. And my understanding, so far, is that the explanatory language of quantum is, in essence, a set of metaphors built around a language of symbols — math — that few of us truly understand. Conceptually, however, those metaphors are usefully transferable, from the consideration of subatomic and cosmic mechanisms to our messy, strange, human lives.

In quantum physics, “entanglement” refers to the connection between particles that remain linked no matter how far apart they drift. What happens to one is instantly mirrored in the other. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” It defies classical logic, but it’s been observed again and again. 

Our lives, too, seem to hold that strangeness. 

You think of someone, and they call. You follow a hunch, and it leads to a long-lost connection. You meet someone who seems new, only to learn that your paths have brushed before — years earlier, in a forgotten place. The world begins to feel less like a grid, and more like a tapestry.

For those trying to build something meaningful — be it a body of creative work, a durable business, or a life of contribution — this idea matters. Entanglement suggests that success may not come solely from linear planning or individual willpower, but from being attuned to the subtle links that bind our stories together. Strategy, in this view, becomes less about control and more about participation.

We are part of a system. And the system remembers.

The wave function of possibility

Another cornerstone of quantum theory is the wave function: the mathematical description of all possible states a particle might occupy before it is observed. Only when measured does the wave “collapse” into a single outcome. This is more than abstract science — it’s an elegant metaphor for the creative process.

Before you share your art with the world, before you pitch the company or ship the product, your idea exists in a cloud of possibility. A superposition of potential outcomes. Will it succeed? Will it fail? Will it evolve into something entirely different? Until it interacts with reality, you don’t know.

The entrepreneurial life, the artistic life, is lived inside that wave. You operate without guarantees. You take action, knowing that only by doing will clarity emerge.

David Bohm believed that reality was fundamentally unbroken. That the separations we perceive are illusions of scale. “The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion,” he wrote.

In other words: everything is connected, even before it appears to be. The wave function is already linked to the system into which it will emerge. Our job is to engage the field of possibility with courage, patience, and creativity — not to predict the outcome, but to invite it.

Long-term thinkers understand this. They embrace uncertainty not as a threat, but as a condition of growth. Instead of aiming at a fixed future, they build adaptive capacity — systems that evolve through feedback, iteration, and openness.

From goals to systems

We love goals. They’re tangible. Trackable. Satisfying to check off. But goals, however motivating, are fragile. They live or die based on variables we often don’t control. Miss the mark, and discouragement sets in. Achieve the goal, and the energy that drove you there can vanish.

Systems are different. A system is a way of operating in the world. It’s a set of practices, routines, habits, and relationships that continue to yield value — regardless of whether any one milestone is hit. If you’re a writer, the system is your daily practice. If you’re a founder, the system might be weekly product reviews, tight communication loops, or regular customer conversations. For creatives, it could be feedback circles or small public releases. Whatever the form, a well-designed system compounds over time. It turns effort into momentum.

Systems don’t ask, “Did I win?” They ask, “Did I improve? Did I learn? Did I stay in motion?”

When you adopt a systems mindset, you become resilient to the volatility of outcomes. You become more like a quantum field — shaped by movement, interaction, and the potential for emergence.

Designing for possibility

This quantum way of thinking has practical implications. It invites a different kind of strategy — one that doesn’t cling too tightly to a single plan, but prepares for many futures. Rather than over-optimizing one launch or one outcome, you diversify your experiments. You build buffers — time, capital, bandwidth — so you’re not thrown off course by the inevitable disruptions. You pay attention to intuition, synchronicity, and emergence, because these soft signals often precede real shifts.

In business, this might mean testing small versions of your product across different markets, or creating modular teams that can quickly reconfigure as conditions change. In the arts, it might mean following the thread of your own curiosity — even when the path seems impractical — because often it’s the strangest detours that lead to your most enduring work.

You don’t aim for certainty. You aim for range. You aim for systems that make you more capable of responding — not reacting — to what the world gives you. And you listen for the signals. The quiet tugs. The uncanny timings. The conversation that leads to the next idea. The person you meet at just the right moment.

These aren’t accidents. They are wave collapses — moments when the field resolves into form.

Nonlocal impact and the question of legacy

In quantum theory, there’s a concept known as nonlocality — the idea that two events can be connected even when they are separated by vast distances. Change something here, and something over there shifts.

This is more than physics. It’s how legacy works.

You never know who’s watching. Or listening. Or quietly drawing strength from what you’ve made. A song recorded in a quiet studio reaches someone years later in a moment of grief. A gesture of kindness passed from mentor to mentee changes the tone of a company culture. A small product, barely noticed at first, becomes the cornerstone of a movement a decade later.

We tend to think of impact in immediate terms. Numbers. Metrics. Likes and shares. But the long game is rarely visible in real time. Influence moves like water — seeping into cracks, carrying memory downstream. So much of what lasts begins unnoticed. Which is why it matters how you build. Not just what you build.

Integrity, generosity, thoughtfulness — these are the materials of legacy. Not because they guarantee recognition, but because they shape the conditions through which your work will travel. Through which it might — just might — find its way to someone who needs it most.

Living the quantum long game

To think in quantum terms is to abandon the illusion of separateness. You are not isolated. Your efforts are not self-contained. You are part of a field. And that field responds.

David Bohm, again: “In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.”

If we take that seriously, then building a life — an organization, a body of work — is not about domination, or certainty, or perfection. It is about resonance. Fidelity. Staying in rhythm with what is true.

To outlast, then, is not to harden. It is to deepen.

It is to create with care. To listen to timing. To move with humility, because the path you’re walking is likely shaped by things far beyond your current view. Sometimes, it takes decades for the work to speak. Sometimes, your reward is not recognition, but the quiet knowledge that you did something well. That it held up. That it mattered.

And sometimes — if you’re lucky — the universe winks back.

So build carefully. Live attentively. Make peace with uncertainty. And never underestimate the quiet forces guiding your way. 

The long game isn’t about control.

It’s about staying in motion — entangled, aware, and open.
It’s about trusting that your thread belongs in the tapestry.
And knowing, somehow, that the field is already listening.