Imagine you enter a coffee shop ready to have that donut you have been craving the whole day… They charge you $4 for it, a little expensive, you think, but you buy it anyway. Finally, you give it a bite, and it tastes as disappointing as it can be, but you think to yourself: “Well, I have already paid $4 for it, so I better eat it anyway” because if you weren’t eating the donut, you would lose the money you’ve invested in it, though you don’t really enjoy the result of your investment. THAT is a sunk-cost fallacy and can – as you see – affect your life in any aspect.
Translate that situation to the career path you’ve chosen. You have already invested 4, 5 or who knows how many years, money and effort in it. “Quitting” or “walking away” from that investment is something you don’t even want to think about, even if you are not happy. Crazy right?
To those who don’t actually know about my career path, let me recap. I started University in 2013 to become a Multimedia Designer, I would then find out that I didn’t actually know what that was about.
After finishing the first year and facing a lifetime crisis, where I told myself that I had completely wasted a year, I changed my career path to Visual Communication Design. That was way better, but I was an okay designer. I didn’t think I was the best by any means, and that was because I never thrived trying to be the best either, and that was simply because my heart wasn’t fully in it.
So, about to graduate, I was going through my flop era. I didn’t know what to do with my life whatsoever, and I couldn’t see myself working as a graphic designer for a living.
A creative outlet is what I was looking for in a professional career, but it is one of the hundreds that are available out there and that I knew so little about.
I believe it all comes down to the educational system and the society we are involved in, whereat the age of 17 or even younger you have to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life with so little information of the true possibilities out there. The majority of us struggle so much trying to figure that out, and despite that, there are, in fact, so few of those who are born already knowing – lucky them – we feel the peer pressure of deciding and choosing well. It’s also about the way we rank different careers and skills to be more valuable than others when the only one who can truly make value out of a career, whichever it is, is yourself.
If we didn’t feel so guilty about turning our futures around at any point without punishing ourselves for “the time we’ve lost,” that would make it so much easier. Because the truth is – now I know – every experience that you go through is learning; every single experience will take you to the next better version of yourself, and it is the knowledge you can always come back to so that you have a better performance.
Despite actually knowing all of this, the Sunk-cost fallacy hits you.
“We want to stay where we feel most comfortable and reject what doesn’t, EVEN if it’s objectively better for us” (The Mountain Is You).
Pride and ego also play a big role when it comes to the prestige you have in certain positions or careers, and this also makes it a little harder to “quit.”
Well, let me tell you something that these past years have proven us wrong: We are not eternal, we are not immortal, and life is too short to waste it on something that wouldn’t actually make you happy. Right?
