Ever spend hours, days, thousands, patience (in other words: a lot) on nothing? Not nothing no-thing, but the one that ends up futile, no results, you-didn’t-get-to-where-you-wanted or not-have-what-you-needed.
Then when all is done and done, what now? Usually when this happens, I ask myself: what was that for? How can I make that not worthless?
I had already spent time and energy and resources on that, I can’t just stop with this no-progress, right?
Wrong. Most of the time.
Because what happens is that we end up spending way more time and energy and resources still trying to make things work just so we wouldn’t waste anything. And in some cases that looks like cooking spoiled food.
Better to just throw it and move on.
Sometimes sunk cost fallacy manifests as trying to think of “What can I learn with that?” for way too long as well. It might seem like that doesn’t hurt, but do we really have to keep that rotten fish in the fridge just to remind ourselves to do better next time?
Rote learning isn’t as effective as the education system makes it out to be. That is, if we actually want to learn.