Don’t Throw Good Money After Bad

16 Feb Don’t Throw Good Money After Bad

Have you ever felt something reverberate through you? In the way that live music does at a concert, or how it would feel to stand near train tracks as one passes by. It’s completely electrifying. Suddenly every cell within your body comes alive, making you feel more human than you’ve ever been.

I experienced this feeling a couple of years ago while listening to a podcast. In fact, it was the first episode I had clicked on from the Good Life Project. But something about the title and description had me intrigued.

Entitled “Don’t Throw Good Money (or Love) After Bad,” the host, Jonathan Fields, manages to sum up in 10 minutes the EXACT situation I faced before pivoting my career from marketing to publishing, and then from publishing to self-employment as a career coach.

The original saying “Don’t throw good money after bad,” as Jonathan explains, refers to the idea of ‘sunk costs.’ If you didn’t happen to go to business school, a sunk cost is the money that you invest into something without any guarantee that the venture will pan out. You also cannot recover these costs in the event that it doesn’t.

Sounds a bit risky, doesn’t it? In most cases, it certainly can be. Such as in the examples Jonathan gives about purchasing stock, or spending several years at a job because of where you think it might lead. You either succeed, or you lose everything you’ve put into it.

So why do people take the risk? Well, because while we’re sinking these costs (i.e. money, time, energy, resources, etc.) into what it is that we’re doing—whether it is investments, a relationship, or a career—we truly, honestly believe things will work out. We develop a best-case scenario for how it will all play out.

I started building a best-case scenario of what my career in marketing would look like from the moment I applied to business school. I made all kinds of assumptions about what the courses would be like, how much I would enjoy them, and how well I would excel at the areas of study because this is what I was meant to do. Upon graduation I thought I would be overwhelmed with the amount of job opportunities available, and when I finally landed one I would work in a high-rise office building every day wearing suits and participating lots of very important meetings about multi-million dollar client ad campaigns. Essentially, I thought I was going to be Don Draper from Mad Men.

The university part went mostly according to plan, but once I was out in the real world it became apparent quite quickly that my ideal scenario was way off the mark. For the next three years I bounced around from job to job waiting for one of them to just *click* with me, but it never happened. In fact, these experiences drove me into a deep depression because the industry was so clearly not a good fit for me, yet I still didn’t want to just walk away. Why? Because of the $40,000 and seven years of my life—four in university and three working in the field—I had invested into this career path. These sunk costs were like chains holding me prisoner of my past decisions.

Through counselling and the guidance of my friends and family, I came to a realization. One Jonathan discusses in the podcast episode when he says “There are times when our experience proves our initial guesses, our initial leaps of faith, so wrong that it becomes crystal clear…that this thing is not what we thought it would be in the beginning. And, in fact, it’s never going to be what we thought it was going to be, no matter how much more time we put in.”

Staying committed to something, and continuing to put more resources into it, simply because of the sunk costs you’ve already invested is not reason enough. In fact, it’s probably among the worst decisions you could make in life. That may seem dramatic, but this particular passage from the episode provides a powerful message as to why:

“What you deny when you continue to invest yourself in something purely because of what you have invested to that moment, is the opportunity to create something profoundly better from that moment forward, because your cognitive, your emotional, your spiritual bandwidth remains perpetually locked up in this thing that will never give you what you hoped and thought it would.”

Sometimes you need to walk away, because you will never have the life that you want by continuing to walk down a path that runs in the opposite direction of where you want to go.

That’s easier said than done, however. For many people there’s a tremendous amount of shame involved; a sense of failure for not having seen something through. Beyond sunk costs, this sense of failure has been the second biggest barrier for me over the years. I’ve always needed to be a shining star at everything I do, even if I don’t enjoy it. So abandoning jobs and entire career paths has been deeply humiliating for me.

But it shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t be ashamed or feel like I’ve failed simply because I decided they were no longer worth investing myself into.

“The failure,” Jonathan says, “would be committing to continue along that road knowing that it will never lead you where you want it to lead you.”And I couldn’t agree more.

So if you find yourself continuing to stick with a job or profession solely out of obligation, STOP! Cut your losses. Yes, you’ll lose what you invested in the form of time, money and energy. But what you gain is the reclamation of your life; the chance to start anew.