Persistence is a virtue – except when it isn’t.
You’ll often see this quotation attributed to Albert Einstein:
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
By this definition, insanity is extremely common.
At some level of our minds, though, that strategy must make sense, or we wouldn’t keep pursuing it. Perhaps it’s just that we can’t think of anything new, or that despite the lack of results we get some kind of comfort from pursuing a familiar strategy. Perhaps we get a sense of mastery from performing a sequence of actions that we know how to do well, even if they aren’t giving us the results we want. Perhaps we don’t want to be seen as (or see ourselves as) the kind of person who gives up.
Perhaps we’re just afraid of change. (I’ll talk about that some more in the next post in this series.)
But one of the most difficult things about this strategy is that sometimes, perseverance – doing the same thing over and over – does succeed. How do we tell the difference between situations where it’s worth persevering and situations where it isn’t?
I’ll give you seven questions to ask yourself shortly. First, though, let’s talk about sunk cost.
Sunk cost
Sunk cost is one of those things that separates us from the animals. Not in a good way, though.
If a wolf has invested effort in hunting, and has caught something that is bigger than she can eat at the time, she will eat what she wants and leave the rest. But if we have bought a meal that’s too big for us, we’ll often force down more than we actually want, because we paid for it.
This is the idea of “sunk cost”. We value things because of the resources we have sunk into getting them, regardless of whether we can ever retrieve that value (say, by selling them). Unfortunately, this means that we will persist far too long with unproductive behaviour. As Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, we are in blood stepped in so deep that returning were as tedious as go o’er. We’ve come this far, so we’re determined to finish.
I’ve talked a few times about my experience, as a young man, of working for a voluntary organization. I stayed with that group for most of a year, from March to October. In May of that year, I returned from Australia, where I was getting training, to New Zealand to participate in my university graduation ceremony. (New Zealand university exams used to be marked in London at one time, and it took until May for the results to come back, so that’s when the graduation ceremony is still held. It’s one of those things that keep being done the same way, even though the situation has changed, because that’s just what we do.)
Now, by May of that year I already had almost all of the signs I was going to get that things weren’t working out. A substantial portion of the money that was supposed to be funding me wasn’t coming through. I was stressed and unhappy, struggling with the expectations of the organization and my living situation. The smart thing to do would have been to stop right then, rather than put myself through another five months of misery (during most of which I was actually ill with stress).
But I didn’t want to be a quitter, and I had put so much effort in already, so after graduation, back I went.
(The blog You Are Not So Smart, which looks at how we often behave irrationally, has a good post on the Sunk Cost Fallacy, by the way.)
photo credit: Dave Kleinschmidt
Questions to ask when your strategy isn’t working
Here are the seven questions I promised, to help you get more clarity on a stuck situation.
- Can this course of action ever produce the result I want? Has it done so for other people? If so, are they doing it exactly the same way I am?
- What is the basis for my conviction that I will get the result from doing this? Do I have any rationale, or is it purely an emotional attachment to the process?
- Have I seen any hint of success so far? Can I build on that?
- Are there other, better paths to the same destination that I could try instead or at the same time?
- Is this even a destination that I want to reach? Am I just aiming for it out of a habit of thought rather than any real desire to achieve it?
- If I stopped using this strategy, what would happen? How would I and the people who are important to me deal with that change?
- Can I just walk away from my “sunk cost” in this strategy, knowing that I will never get it back no matter what I do?
(If you’re looking for a slightly different checklist – one to decide whether to give up or not – take a look at my post Perseverance: How to Keep Going and How to Know When to Stop, on my How to Be Amazing site.)
Lessons learned repeatedly
I got an email recently from someone on my mailing list, a young man who was concerned about the fact that he saw himself repeating his mistakes that he thought he’d already learned from once. Like me at around the same age, he’d gone along with others’ expectations and bumped up against the fact that their direction for his life wasn’t the right one for him. But he seemed to be falling back into the same pattern again.
I let him in on the secret that we slightly older people know, that yes, the same lessons do keep coming round. But I also gave him the metaphor of the spiral path up the mountain, where you keep coming to the same view but from a higher vantage point. It seems like you’re returning to the same thing again, but you are actually making progress.
So even if you seem to be stuck in the same pattern, it might be working at another level. Only you can judge that.
Ask yourself the seven questions. And if you need help getting out of your pattern, that’s what I’m here for. Talk to me.
This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.
