I was running a mentoring session this evening. We happened to talk about my last post. I mentioned that when you read you can learn from lessons before you have to experience them. They challenged me with a question, “What lessons have you learned that I can avoid?”
This is why I love mentoring, sometimes you can be challenged as much as you intend to challenge. I responded let me think about it today and I will write it on my post tonight. I came up with three things that I have learned which hope they don’t need to learn by experience. I will post them one a day. Here is number 1:
I spent alot of my childhood with my grandfather. He loved to gamble and so I spent many evenings with him at the dog track Wimbledon or Catford. I watched good men sink their last £100 pounds on a race thinking they will win this time. That their system will be good this time. Thinking that they have lost £900 on the dogs that night they have lost too much to not keep with the system.
I saw too many friends and colleagues hold on to relationships they knew were toxic. Why? Because they had been together too long to give up now.
I saw a friend of mine stay unhappy working as Doctor. He did not like his career and yet he continued to practice medicine because they spent so much of their life and money on that endeavour. He still practices unhappy and unfulfilled.
I have had a front row seat in what I would later learn can be called the sunk cost fallacy. People I cared for have commited the sunk cost fallacy their whole lives. They continue a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources (that can be time, money or effort)
So thats my first lesson to share. Avoid the sunk cost fallacy. Every day is a new gift, every Pound you own is as valuable as the last. Focus on the future instead of the feeling of wastefulness or guilt that accompanies dropping an earlier commitment
Sea's The Day 