How to Escape the Sunk Cost Trap in Your Career
"At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts."
I am thirty now.
When I look back to my life before thirty, it was not always smooth sailing. Some interviewers even pointed out that my experiences had significant ups and downs. I took such comments as a compliment because through the storms, there were growth and innovation.
Allow me to talk it through:
Although my mind was bent, twisted, and smashed, I was normal before the age of 16. It all started that year as I decided to pick up a brush and a pencil and learn how to paint. I became an art student. In college I majored in industrial design. After graduation, the world seemed like a puzzle to me. I wanted to understand why those designs needed to be made and who should make decisions. Therefore, I went to the U.K. and studied a Master of Creative and Cultural Industries Management. Then, I joined a start-up and an FMCG company as a marketer in China.
Now, here I am, typing my post for the blog I built three months ago in Auckland, New Zealand, after I finished an MBA study at the University of Otago.
Some people would call it "a distraction" or "inconsistency". I preferred to use this phrase: connect the dots and make things right. I was astounded by the number of people who asked "Do I know what I want to do in my life?" and answered "To be honest, I have no idea." Some of those who asked themselves were in their thirties just like me. Some of them, even older.
We had been influenced by many things around us. Family, society, colleagues, social media, cultures, habits, etc. We barely make our own decisions based on our own needs. It's hard to be a free soul nowadays. But how does this journey begin?
Let me introduce: Sunk cost.
Sunk cost: a common term in both corporate finance and economics. It refers to money that has already been spent and cannot be recovered. The rule of thumb is to ignore the sunk cost in consideration of future investments. What a clever idea! But in fact, our lives are often dragged away by sunk costs. We would be afraid of changing careers because of the experience we accumulated in certain areas. Even though we did not enjoy them or have a passion for them. We even feared that those experiences would disappear, and our achievements would be in vain if we started something new.
Our lives weren't maths; but puzzles. I embedded design thinking and creative thinking into business strategy design and problem-solving. And the moment I picked up a brush, jumped on the flight to the U.K and attended the first class in the MBA program has formed me who I am now. Ultimately, our previous experiences would play an unexpected role in our new careers, providing us with new perspectives and ways of thinking.
That is how innovation sprouts.
No learning will be in vain. "Never stop learning and discovering, no matter how physically old." Although learning is never a pleasant thing to do. There are blocks, criticisms, comparisons, expectations, validations, and change. To recognise space to improve, then, to want to change, to act to change and to persist in changing despite difficulties, then to get to a new journey or to sprout an innovation, most people get stuck somewhere along this line.
Most people cannot recognise they have the capacity to improve. Even more people recognise this space for innovation but decide they're comfortable not changing. A few change but cannot persist. Which is a greater tragedy?