A Story of Sunk Costs in Three Acts

Act I

I once wrote a near-memoir, fictionalized to avoid family controversy, about the failure of my first marriage. It stretched hundreds of pages. When I sent it to my agent at the time, she responded in one curt, cold paragraph. She said it lacked a clear genre. It failed to develop the characters sufficiently. It just wasn't working.

Try as I could, I failed to separate her words about my work from myself. They fit both, after all. My whole life has been a curvy set of swerves around anything that could be called a consistent genre. On many days, you could convincingly argue I was insufficiently developed. And well, the manuscript was just one of many things working imperfectly.

Because I believe in persistence, I hired a good editor who gave me 12 pages of massive fixes to consider. I started to do the work. Then, eventually, I quit.

I didn't want to retreat into that effort again. It was the story of falling apart. It ended with the beginning of my new life. I was well into second chances and knew the greater part of me was ready to move on, from the relationship that failed and from the story about it that was failing too. I could no longer bring myself to rework my personal history, which felt like doubling down on an already massive emotional investment. Not then. Maybe someday, but not then. That was my past, and what was far more energizing was what might come next. And I had an idea for a new book.

But oh, the sunk costs: waking up at dawn and writing before work every day for four years. Reams of pages. So many, I nearly reconsidered my decision. Then I tried to tell myself it was not a total loss. Wise people assured me the whole effort was a necessary step in my "journey" as a person and a writer. "Journey" seemed like a rosy euphemism given the colossal inefficiency of my years of slogging. Couldn't I have chosen a faster, better way to build a foundation from which to move on?

I guess not.

So I'll share what it took me 500 pages, written and rewritten and rewritten again, to realize: there are merits in revisiting the past. But not in hanging out there indefinitely.

Act II

I once interviewed investment bankers to sell the company I'd been struggling to turn around. It had been a brutal stretch, cutting costs, reorganizing people and the business, even striking power poses in the bathroom on the worst days because a TED talk said it might restore a sense of confidence in bleak moments. Power posing proved to keep the adrenaline high but fell short of making a hockey stick of the company's numbers. The original investors kept investing, hoping to see things turn around.

I stood at my desk one day, so my voice would sound better, and pitched a banker on the phone from California. I took him through the history - where we'd been, what we'd addressed, where we were going. As I spoke, I gained momentum, encouraged by all the ground we'd covered on the way to something better.

"I see potential," he said at the end of it. "As for your pitch, lose the history."

Lose the history. Right. What did he care about fixes of the past, the sunk costs incurred. I was attached to them, along with the original investors, but he was not, for good reason. It was too much exposition on the journey covered, not the road ahead.

Wise words from an unlikely place. A reminder that what got me here isn't necessarily what will get me there.

Act III

I was raised not to give up, so I became a plugger. If I worked hard enough, surely things would work out. But they didn't always. I remember little things that felt so big, like dropping a class in college that was not for me. I felt like a failure for quitting after a few weeks, even though it gave me time to study what I loved. I'd spent so much time working a problem, it was hard to drop the habit.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. But not in the same way, endlessly.

The psychology of sunk costs is both crazy and understandable. You keep at something because you've put so much effort into it, layering more effort upon the past effort, compounding the failure in an attempt to turn it around, imagining more of what didn't work will somehow yield success. In this way, the past is your present and future.

Or maybe you manage to move on, but only partially. You keep revisiting the old investment, marveling or despairing at its incredible price tag, counting its cost despite the fact it is already paid.

But some classes should be dropped. Some drafts of novels were meant to be thrown away. Some products or projects need to be shut down. The time spent on these things holds lessons, but that doesn't mean they deserve yet more time.

Daniel Kahneman has said, "When I work I have no sunk costs. I like changing my mind. Some people really don’t like it but for me changing my mind is a thrill. It’s an indication that I’m learning something. So I have no sunk costs in the sense that I can walk away from an idea that I’ve worked on for a year if I can see a better idea."

I want to think more like that, and not just because he won the Nobel Prize. I'm still learning to walk away and walk on, without excessive attachment, from what deserves to be left behind.

So I ask myself, what if you were dropped like a fresh-eyed stranger into your life right now, with no memory of the slogs of the past or the sunk costs of your experience? Maybe you wouldn't look back for ages or hesitate to move on. And you wouldn't fear cutting your losses.

You would lose the compulsion to recount the history getting in the way of charting your future, however close its lessons may helpfully dwell in the deeper memory of your heart. You would throw away the stories that no longer serve you.

There would be no doubling down on that old, broken anchor on the ocean's floor. No sinking to what is already sunk.

You would think only of now, not then. Now and next: the next chapter, the next step, the next adventure on a new shore.