I Don’t Want to Admit Failure

An Insight from In the Room

“I know how that feels, I am not letting go of things in my business because it will be an admission of failure, and my ego won’t let that happen.” - Room 27 Member

The sunk cost fallacy shows up everywhere.

It is a cognitive bias that rears its head when operators hold on to projects that are not working. It is a drive to continue the course of action because of invested time, effort and money.

The logical fallacy is that you will never get the time or money back and so it should not influence your decisions today.

What is hard is knowing when to let things go and when to push through. Seth Godin has written a book about this called The Dip, which is worth a read.

Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, tells it best in his book “Only the Paranoid Survive”, when trying to decide whether to continue with their investment into the memory space. I turned back to Gordon and I asked, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memory.” I stared at him, numb, then said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”

Wisdom from Out the Room

“When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.” - Confucius

“The more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.” - Greg McKeown