Flexibility vs Sunk Costs [TMP #102]

Closing September.

Happy new month! 🥳

And if you’re Nigerian, happy Independence Day :)

It’s now Q4 in 2024 but personally, it’s been feeling like a new year since August. I think about the first half and my health has truly seen leaps and bounds—all that to say, new beginnings and the chance to restart. Take it.

This episode at a glance:

• Flexibility vs Sunk Costs

• Book Club 📖

• TMP Archive 📝

I discovered a new song today and it fits right into classic Nollywood songs. You’re welcome 🫡

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Flexibility & Sunk Costs

I’m beginning to see that life is way more flexible than I allow it to be. I’ve met some people who dropped out of one graduate program, at the finish line, to start another graduate program. In a recent class, I read about a brilliant lady who dropped out of a PhD program to become a lawyer¹ because it was not satisfying. In both cases, um, what?

My first thought has consistently been “what about the time spent?” But I see that this line of thinking distracts me from the point, which is making progress. Progress here is discovering what does not work and moving on to something with a better fit. You can rephrase that with “fail forward” or even longer, “what’s the point of rushing in the wrong direction?”

I suppose what I’m learning is to not be afraid of sunk costs.

“The sunk cost fallacy is our tendency to follow through with something that we’ve already invested heavily in (be it time, money, effort, or emotional energy), even when giving up is clearly a better idea.”

Source

Sometimes, we have a clearer picture of what to do through trial and error. Sometimes, being in a “mistake” is what we need to know what is good and what is not— and if this is the case, the event is not a mistake but simply a part of the story. Like a cornerstone event.

Importantly, a drastic step does not need to make complete sense because remember the Steve Jobs’ quote? “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” I can’t remember what sparked the thought now but it hit me last week that part of what it means to live life is to manage uncertainty. Getting paralysed by options is not a solution; we simply make decisions and adjust as necessary. Hindsight will always be 50/50.

So be flexible and enjoy the gift of life. And in being flexible, I hold on to the promise that all things always work together for good for God’s beloveds.

Till October ending, y’all,

Dayo 🤗

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Book Club 📖

I am currently reading my Heat and Mass Transfer textbook lmao but a good non-fiction I recommend is Max Lucado’s In The Grip of Grace.

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TMP Archive 📝

I finally watched this after spending months in my YouTube Watch Later playlist :)

1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research (Link)