Good Life Project - Don’t Throw Good Money (or Love) After Bad.

Episode Date: February 2, 2017

You’ve heard the phrase, “don’t throw good money after bad?” It basically means, once you realize the thing you’ve invested in is not what you though it would be AND likely never will be, don’t keep putting new money into it just because of what you’ve already invested. Take your losses or your “sunk costs” (the […]The post Don’t Throw Good Money (or Love) After Bad. appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode is brought to you by my new book. I know I'm our sponsor. So you guys have heard me talk about it in the past, I think towards the end of last year, my new book, my latest book, How to Live a Good Life came out and I've been blown away by the reception to it. It's very straightforward, surprising science, soulful stories, and practical wisdom. It's a blend of, you know, pretty much a lot of what this show is about, but really distilled into pure, actionable wisdom and insights designed to walk you through a process and introduce you to a model that I call the Good Life Buckets that I hope will really help you live a good life. It's a great time of year to be exploring this and really using it as a tool to do the

things you're here to do, to become what you're knowing you can become, and also to find the grace in being just as you are. So check it out. You can find it pretty much all over Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local bookstores, indies, how to live a good life. Okay, on to our show. So ever hear the phrase, don't throw good money after bad? So here's my question. What if you change the word money to love? Don't throw good love after bad? Does that change the way that it lands for you? It's kind of an interesting question. Let me zoom the lens out

for a second. The original phrase, don't throw good money after bad. Well, it comes from something called the idea of sunk costs. And that it's essentially, it's the money that you put into something before you know if it's going to work. So for an example, you've got a hot lead on a stock and you don't know much about it. It's a new company, but you have an inside line and somebody gives you a chance to invest in it. So you put a thousand dollars in or you're starting a business and you've made a whole bunch of assumptions about whether it's going to work or not. And you hope and pray that it will. And you put one hundred thousand dollars in a bank to fund the business, and then you go for it. Or you take a new job, and you go and spend five years working,

fiercely devoting yourself to that job, making a whole bunch of assumptions about how you're going to experience it, whether you're going to like it or not, and whether it'll be worth it for you. And you're willing to put in the money, the time, and the energy, the resources, in the name of this thing working out the way that you really think and hope it's going to work out. And then here's what happens. Along the way, all those assumptions that we made about whether this was a good thing or not, whether it was going to work, whether it was going to be the bundle of awesomeness that we thought it was going to be, those assumptions start to get replaced by actual experience,

by information, by data. And along the way, some of that information, some of that experience, it's going to prove our initial hunch right. And then some, it is going to prove it wrong. And there are times when our experience proves our initial guesses, our initial leaps of faith, so wrong that it becomes crystal clear to pretty much everyone but us 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, no matter how much more money we put into it. And yet, we stay in it.

And the reason so many of us stay in it is because of this idea of sunk costs. We tell ourselves, well, I've already sunk five years into this. How can I just walk away from that? We've already sunk $10,000 into this. How can I just walk away from that? We've already sunk years of love and adoration and emotion and invested our time and energy into a relationship. How can I just walk away from that? Given how much I've put into it to date,

it would all be for naught. The thing is, when we make a decision based on sunk costs, we pretty much always lose. Staying committed to something when that is your pure, your sole surviving reason is pretty much always a really bad decision. The question you want to ask yourself when you get to that moment in time is not how can I walk away from the time, money, love, emotion, investment I put into this, but if I were to have the opportunity to start this business, this career, this relationship

today, knowing what I now know, having now not had to rely on all the assumptions, the leaps of faith and guesses, but actually having the experience and the information to know so much more of the truth of the matter, knowing what I now know today, would I, here and now, make that same investment in time, money, love, commitment, whatever it may be? Would I do it? And for most of us, if the answer to that question is no, then the rational choice is just to walk away. Now, walking away may be easier in some circumstances than the other, just because of the complexity of your life. If it's something that's simple, you may be able to literally just say, I'm shutting it down. I'm walking away. I'm ending this. But if you've built a pretty substantial amount of your life around this relationship, this business, the career, you may have to actually say, I've made my decision, but now I actually, because of what I've built around it, now I'm going to actually have to plot a path that is going to take time for me to figure out how am I going to replace this income? How am I going to replace this, whatever it is,

how am I going to extract myself from the complexity that I've built around it? And maybe that will take you days, weeks, months, maybe even years. But the point is you make the decision and you begin the process rather than saying, I'm going to stick to this just because of what I've got into it. Because what you deny, what you deny when you continue to invest yourself in something purely because of what you have invested to that moment, what you deny yourself 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. And it's now shown that to be true. And you're doing it purely out of a sense of obligation.

And while you do that, you are absolutely destroying the possibility of creating something better with every breath that you take from this moment forward. And we don't think about that all that often. There's something about this idea of sunk cost where we feel a sense of obligation. We feel almost as if it's, you know, we're giving up. There's this ethos of if you started it, you must finish it. And if you don't go all the way with this, then you're a failure. You're giving up. There's shame involved in that. And the truth is there is no shame involved in that.

We start everything knowing a little bit and guessing a whole lot. And if we pay attention, the guessing gets replaced by more and more knowing, and it reveals the true nature of what we're doing. The moment it does, we are in a way better position to choose how to move forward. And choosing that this is no longer worth our investment is not about shame. There is no shame involved in that. There is no failure involved in that. The failure would be committing to continue along that road, knowing that it will never lead you where you want it to lead you. Now, there may be other things. There may be sense of familial obligation or responsibility or any layer of other societal constructs or

expectations or promises that you have made that layer on top of sunk costs. And you have to look at each one of those individually and say, is this a legitimate reason to stay the course? Sometimes it is, oftentimes it's not. But the big idea I want to plant here is that if the solitary, the driving reason is because you've invested so much, how can I just walk away from that? If that is the only thing that's keeping you in it, hit reset. Ask the fresh question. If I knew today what I now know when I was starting this and I had this opportunity now, would I say yes? If the answer is no, walk away or begin the process of extraction from whatever it is. Because when you do that, you for the first time create the space for new possibility. So that's what I'm thinking about today's Good Life Project riff. Noodle on it, share it a little bit. If it resonates with you,

have a conversation around this. As with everything we do here at Good Life Project, ideas are one thing, conversations are what give them life. So talk about this with somebody else. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.