You’re doing important work even if you don’t see it. Because what’s important is the doing part.
Yet, regardless of the work we’re doing, we’re going to run into sunk costs. Those pesky things we called investments at the time that we can no longer get back.
It’s those nonrefundable purchases or those items we bought but never used or the things that we got but then ignored for something else.
Thinking back to what can be a sunk cost doesn’t help us make educated decisions about the future, though.
If you were to get tickets for a concert that you couldn’t refund or trade then your friends invited you over for game night, either decision costs you what the tickets cost.
In that scenario, thinking about monetizing each experience doesn’t help you because they both cost the same, but you can think forward to which you will have more fun doing.
Consider the business decision of signing a contract for a social listening tool that tracks media coverage of your business and sends you a daily digest, but instead of reading the digest you spend 20 minutes per day training your team on building relationships with the media.
Both actions cost the same as what you paid for the contract, but what matters is the future outcome of where you spend your time.
We call them sunk costs for a reason. They’re sunk. Let someone else waste their time in exploring the things left behind, and if they don’t realize that you left them because you had a better investment, so be it.
What’s more is the emotional equivalent of sunk costs: emotional waste.
Too often we wrestle quantifying all the time, energy and emotion we’ve put into something. We have identified with it and made it part of the story we tell others about ourselves.
It’s tough to leave behind, but, like sunk costs, what’s important is that we make the choice to pivot toward something that puts us in a direction of happier or greater impact.
Regardless of the decision we make, the emotional waste is the same. What matters is what we do going forward.
Stay Positive & Onward To Better
Photo credit
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