People ask me what Wildcard means, and I confess the question pleases me, because the name was chosen precisely so that it could not be answered quickly.

A wildcard is the one element in the game that has not yet declared itself. It is every card and no card. It holds all values at once, and it surrenders them only at the moment it is played. The physicists have a word for this condition. They call it superposition, the state of a thing that exists in all its possibilities simultaneously, until the moment of observation collapses it into a single fact.

I believe certain men live this way. Not many. The world is very eager to name us, and most accept the name early. A profession, a city, a manner of dress, a ceiling. The naming is comfortable, and comfort is the great collapser of possibility. But there are men who decline the observation. They keep their futures plural. They walk into a room and one cannot say with certainty what they will become, only that it has not happened yet, and that it will be considerable.

Wildcard exists for that interval. The interval before the declaration. We do not make shoes for the man the world has finished describing. We make them for the man still holding every card in his hand.

This is why we speak of the Undefined Path. A defined path is a collapsed one. Someone walked it, measured it, and posted its destination at the entrance. The paths that interest us have no signage. They pass through country where a man is briefly unobserved, and therefore briefly infinite.

I am often told this is a romantic way to run a company. Perhaps. But I have noticed that the objects men keep for life are never the ones that told them who they were. They are the ones that were present while they decided.