What sunk costs are we finding hard to let go?
What past investments are we trying to justify?
What choices are we sticking with just because we’ve already invested so much?
It might be time spent on a strategy that isn’t working. Resources committed to projects that no longer serve our mission. Relationships we maintain out of history rather than value.
Sometimes we hold onto approaches just because they were hard to build. We defend positions just because they were expensive to establish. We continue paths just because we’ve travelled them for so long. We stick to bad customers because we’re afraid to fire them.
The hardest sunk costs to abandon aren’t the financial ones but the emotional ones – our beliefs about what should work, our identity wrapped up in past decisions, and our reluctance to admit we might have been wrong.
But yesterday’s investment shouldn’t determine tomorrow’s direction.