From the course: Essentialism: Improve Your Work by Focusing on the Essentials (Blinkist Summary)

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The sunk cost bias

The sunk cost bias

From the course: Essentialism: Improve Your Work by Focusing on the Essentials (Blinkist Summary)

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The sunk cost bias

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- [Narrator] Blink number eight. Stop doing unnecessary things by withdrawing from failures and setting boundaries. Have you ever ended up doing something that you knew was a waste of effort simply because you committed to it? A lot of people fall into this sunk-cost bias. The sunk-cost bias is the tendency to continue investing money, time, effort, and or energy, into something we already know is unlikely to succeed. Unfortunately, every little investment makes it harder for us to let go, while simultaneously increasing the amount we are sure to lose. To illustrate this, consider the spectacular failure of the Concorde jet. Although it was an astonishing engineering achievement, the cost made it unprofitable and doomed to commercial failure. Regardless, the French and British governments fell into a sunk-cost bias and continued investing in it for four decades, fully aware that most of their money would never be…

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