Sunk Cost

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

- C. S. Lewis

I wonder how many writers experience this? I would guess that virtually all of them do. I started a piece, and I got about 1,000 words into it, and then I thought, “so what? Why am I writing this? What is the point of this piece?” I backed up, regrouped, tried again, wrote 500 more words, and once again, hit the wall.

No joy.

Sometimes we are so close to a subject that there is no way to obtain perspective. In this case, it was something so fundamental to myself that I could not break it apart. I could not explain it because I did not know it. I knew it was there, but not what it was.

And then as I was exploring this, or trying to, I realized that it does not matter. It matters to me, but not to anyone else.

And so, I have a deadline, and I have 1,500 words that do not matter.

I am imagining my writer friends thinking “welcome to the club, pal!” This does give me comfort. One benefit of reading advice from other writers is that I know I am not alone.

Since I am in this conundrum, let me go through my process for “hitting the silk,” or “punting” on this piece.

I could just skip this week’s Things to Realize. This is distasteful.

I could try and try again until the piece is done, even after the deadline sails by me. I tried that, and as noted above, no joy.

Or I can come clean and let my readers know that I had to kill 1,500 words. And, maybe pull something that does matter out of the experience.

And so here we are.

In economics, there is the concept of sunk cost. This is money spent that is gone forever. This is not a problem in itself if the money was spent on a successful project or item. But sunk cost becomes a problem when the money was spent on something that failed. The money is gone, and there is no return on investment. This is exacerbated if the project owner tries to recoup the costs by continuing the failed project or by trying to fix the failed item. This is known as “throwing good money after bad,” or “beating a dead horse,” or officially, the “sunk cost fallacy.”

There is a fine line between quitting, and recognizing that something is just not going to work now. There is a point where the wise thing to do is to retreat and regroup. Or just retreat and flush. To take the sunk cost as a loss, and move on.

It is okay to recognize that something is not working. In fact it is necessary. Why continue to spent time and effort and money on something that does not work? You don’t have unlimited time. It’s a cliché but time is more precious than gold, and continuing to spend time on things that are useless is a damned shame. That includes relationships. That includes dead-end jobs.

So, making the decision to quit a fruitless endeavor is a win, because you are winning back the time and money and emotional capital that you would have squandered otherwise.

So, this week, I am lighting the proverbial fire to the pages that just did not work out. Next week? We shall see!