Let’s start today off with a story…

Juan spent the last 10 years of his life building a sailboat. It was a beautifully polished and sea-worthy vessel with a huge mast and fully stocked for his 2-week sailing trip.

After 10 long years, the day finally came for Juan to set sail! Life was good! He was riding high! Nothing can stop him now!

*thunk

He hit something in the water and the boat started sinking rapidly. It was clearly a lost cause. His only option was to abandon ship and swim back to shore.

But instead, Juan refused to accept the facts and he went down with the ship, drowning just 100 yards from the beach.

Pretty dumb, right?

“Juan, why didn’t you just get off the boat!?!”

This is called the Sunk Cost Fallacy and you do it too… Let’s dive in!

The Sunk Cost Fallacy is when you invest so heavily into something that - when that something has clearly failed - you refuse to correct course.

People do this for all kinds of reasons:

• Emotional attachment (“I spent the last 10 years working on this boat. I’m not jumping ship.”)

• Perceived reputation (“All of my friends who were proud of my work on this boat are going to think I’m a failure.”)

• Motivated perception (“The leak isn’t that bad! It might still be able to sail!”)

Sound familiar? It’s not just Juan - we all do this.

But lucky for us, Gary Vee inadvertently gave us the solution…

The famous entrepreneur/author/bold personality was recently asked on the My First Million podcast, “You rub elbows with a lot of ultra-successful people. What separates the ‘ultra-successful’ from the ‘kind-of successful?’”

He said “The ultra-successful aren’t afraid to walk backwards.”

In other words… The ultra-successful don’t give a rats a** about sunk costs.

Let’s think about it:

• Elon Musk - The guy started out creating a payment software (and other stuff) before sinking his literal life savings into building rockets and electric cars.

• Arnold Schwarzenegger - He gave up bodybuilding for what? Acting? And then he gave up acting for what? Politics? The guy went back to zero twice.

• Gretchen Rubin - She’s a famous podcast host and three-time bestselling author… Good thing she dropped out of law school after two years, huh?

Let’s Bring This Home

One more example… Let’s say you set out with a vision for your life when you were 20 years old.

“I’m going to accomplish x by doing y.”

…but then you get 10 years into ‘y’ and realize “I can’t reach ‘x’ doing this!”

What do you do? Most people stick with ‘y’ and settle for less than ‘x’ because of the sunk costs associated with it.

But what’s the difference between Elon, Arnold, and Gretchen and the rest of the world?

They weren’t afraid to reinvent themselves. They didn’t car about sunk costs. They were willing to climb back down the mountain, find the correct path, and then start again.

They ditched ‘y’ for the sake of ‘x.’

Consider this your push to ditch the sunk costs and correct course🤘

New Youtube Video

I dive deeper into this topic on my Youtube channel! You should go check it out! Just click this orange button and subscribe!

Now here’s that button again…

And one last time…