Dealing with Sunk Cost
"The obvious move would be to scrap the whole thing. Yet ... every fibre of your being wanted you to keep going... Because damn it, you already put in so much time and money and resources into this!"
Welcome back!
Have you ever undertake a project then realize that it was not going the way you wanted it to? At this point, the obvious move would be to scrap the whole thing. Yet you were reluctant to do so. Every fibre of your being wanted you to keep going. Because damn it, you already put in so much time and money and resources into this!
This is called the ‘sunk cost fallacy’. I’ll let Brave Search (through Wikipedia) explain it:
I’m sure you have your own personal examples of sunk cost. As a writer, I have dealt with this when it comes to my writings. At times an essay or a story might not turn up the way I had envisioned it to be. The easiest solution would be to tinker around with it until it got better. But sometimes it could be bad enough that I just put it away for the time being in the hopes of figuring out a real solution at some point in the future. Then there are times in which the best course of action is to scrap it entirely.
Scrapping paragraphs or even chapters is something that happens all the time with authors. I’ve even heard authors saying that they’ve scrapped entire books. Now I have yet to go that far, though I have one unfinished novel I wrote about 10 year ago (give or take) that I don’t plan to finish any time soon.
But for me, the act of scrapping a project/work really hit me in my 3D printing projects. As some of you may know, I’ve been doing some 3D printing with my brother. This is partly fun but also partly business. And we’ve been filling out orders for people as a side-hustle. Here’s an example I put out on Substack Notes:
When the item came out the way it was meant to, it felt great.
When it didn’t… not so much.
Unfortunately with this particular print, we ran into an issue with the printer. We had to cancel the whole print and retry it some other way. So that’s hours of 3D printing wasted. It’s even more frustrating because these crosses take some time to print out since they require a degree of finesse because of the texts and the multi-color nature of the print.
It’s tough to let go but you have to do it.
The reason why the feeling of sunk cost hits me harder in 3D printing than in writing is because I can actually feel the results of my labor in my hand. With my writings, the unfinished ones remain to be yet another file in my hard drive. But with 3D printing, the failed projects were there for you to see… and hold.
But just because that particular print turned out be a waste doesn’t mean what happened was a complete waste. Prior to this incident, we haven’t come across this issue. So we learned a lesson out of this. At the moment, we had to make do with a workaround. Frustrating but that’s business for you. Sometimes things go wrong and you have to adapt.
To close this post, I wonder if this is also the appeal of older video games that are so unforgiving that “game over” means starting over from the very beginning. Does this mean your whole time was wasted? Not necessarily. Sure you have to start from the beginning, but you also learned and discovered what needed to be done in order to beat that game. In other words, you adapt. Just like in the real world where there are no save files.
Until next time, Michael P. Marpaung