When I was ten years old, I went to see a museum exhibit of artifacts from ancient Egypt. 

The detailed sarcophagi, burial ornaments, and mummies were all memorable, but most of all I was spellbound by the tour guide herself. She glowed with enthusiasm; there wasn’t any question she couldn’t answer. I still remember looking with fascination at a series of earthen jars — objects that would have otherwise been dead boring — as she explained to us that these were the very jars the embalmers used to store the person’s lungs, stomach, liver and intestines (the brains were apparently worthless and went into the trash).

“I want to do this,” I remember thinking. And I learned that I could: the Phoenix Art Museum’s docent program was free and open to anyone willing to take the classes. You didn’t have to have a Ph.D or be a luminary. Anyone who followed the training could become a docent and lead tours of their own. ¹

20 years later, I finally decided to make my childhood dream a reality.

Every Monday morning at 9 am I would drive down to the museum and for the next three hours attend workshops and lectures. Soon I was putting together tours of my own and leading “test subjects” around the galleries. I’m not sure how many hours I spent before finally graduating two years later, but it was well over 200. Then the real fun began.

My favorite tours were schoolkids. I led gaggles of them up and down halls, in and out of elevators, and we’d visit everything from modern fashion to Baroque paintings to ancient China and Mesoamerica – even a line-up of historic race cars at one point. These unpretentious young people kept me on my toes; they asked questions and gave answers I didn’t always expect. They taught me just as much as I taught them. It was a year that pushed and stretched me in all directions.

And that’s when I quit.

No, there was no dramatic, inciting event. No one said or did anything to drive me away — in fact, my fellow docents were some of the kindest, most welcoming people I’d ever met. It happened slowly, silently, from the moment I walked off the graduation stage (yes, we had a whole ceremony and everything). It started with a creeping realization that took root in the back of my brain: “I love this, but not enough. It doesn’t fit into the rest of the things I want to do with my life.”

That realization nagged at me like a dull ache in my joints; I tried to ignore it at first. I’d spent so much time and energy that it seemed ludicrous to quit — especially so soon. But it turns out I have a low pain tolerance, so I listened to my gut. I wrote an explanation to the museum, telling them that I’d loved my experience but unfortunately, I couldn’t keep it up. I walked away without a backward glance.

Had I made some kind of colossal mistake in the first place? Had I just wasted three years and hundreds of hours of my life?

Not at all.

Few choices in life are all or nothing

There’s an aphorism from Nietzsche that I think fits these situations well: “Many are obstinate with regard to the path once they have entered upon it, few with regard to the goal.” ²

Like a lot of his quips, it’s a little bit obscure, but what’s clear to me is that the path and the goal are not the same thing. And a lot of people confuse the path with the goal – or else, they cling to the path because they’re convinced it’s the only way or they’re afraid to acknowledge that it’s not compatible with their goal. It may also be that they don’t have a clear goal in the first place.

All of this makes us vulnerable to sunk cost thinking: “I’ve put so much time/money/effort into this thing, I can’t stop now – that would be too discouraging!” And so we hold on, hoping our business will improve or the relationship will somehow turnaround. Most of us have seen more than one miserable marriage drag on for far too long because both parties were too embarrassed to admit they’d made a huge mistake.

A sunk cost doesn’t need to be a case of all or nothing. Instead, we can see it as a brave venture and a creative detour towards our final destination.

In my case, I hadn’t made a mistake in the typical sense of the word, but I was forced to realize that the path of being a docent wasn’t compatible with my biggest goals in life. It could help with those goals in some indirect way, but it came at a steep price in terms of time. It wasn’t a matter of whether I liked leading children around art galleries or not, it was a matter of what I liked and wanted most, especially over time.

Much has been made of how the “sunk cost effect” reveals how illogical we humans are, which I think, ironically, makes the problem worse because humans don’t like to admit they are illogical in the first place. But there is another, much more positive way to look at the whole thing. A sunk cost doesn’t need to be a case of all or nothing. Instead, we can see it as a brave venture and a creative detour towards our final destination.

In the case of the Phoenix Art Museum, I spent a lot of time standing in front of an audience, both talking to strangers and actively listening to what they said – in a way, I was running mini-workshops every month. I made friends with other docents and collaborated with them to make both our jobs easier. I had to email a lot of people (more strangers). I studied artists, artworks, art history, and generally became a more well-rounded person, and I learned how to respond to questions when I didn’t know the answer. In short, I acquired a list of “soft skills” that I’ve since been able to implement in my life in ways I could never have planned or predicted. For all I know, the biggest pay-off is yet to come; but if not, I still wouldn’t consider my experience a “waste.” There are usually at least a few happy side effects and silver linings to all but the worst scenarios.

Connecting the dots looking backwards

The path to the goal, for most of us, is not clear. It’s often winding and roundabout, full of uncertainty yes, but also with beautiful views and leisurely rest stops — so why do we want them to be straight and simple? Why do we obstinately stick to paths we set out on?

I suspect one reason is that we look to others for inspiration, and other people’s success stories tend to look simpler in hindsight. Another reason is that some life paths really are more straightforward, and those often get held up as an example for the rest of us to follow, possibly for that very reason.

A frequent example I see of this is sports: you play on a team as a kid, you get recruited to a special club as a youth, you train so you can win certain important games and awards, you secure a spot on an even more special team, and so on until you’re too old to play — then, you become a coach or a mentor and pass on your hard-earned wisdom to the next generation. Some sports like rowing might be more forgiving in that you can get seriously good at it as a young adult (assuming you’re already an athletic person), but others like gymnastics require unswerving allegiance while your bones are still developing. Of course, athletes have plenty of unexpected things happen to them, too, but it’s a field with exact requirements that doesn’t allow for too many deviations.

But most of us don’t fit this kind of use case. We may have strong interests or even a goal from a young age, but there’s no clear path: for school, career, relationships, or novel experiences. It’s only through trial and error — beautiful, delightful error, but error nonetheless — that we figure out what we really want to do. This was the case with Ed Witten, who tried his hand at political journalism before he became one of the most famous theoretical physicists of all time. Or Leo Tolstoy, who was a debauched gambler and then a soldier before he matured into Russia’s most famous novelist. But one of my favorite examples is Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after only six months, but unlike his contemporary Bill Gates, he didn’t have a clear vision yet of founding a computer company. He just knew that he didn’t want to waste any more of his parents’ money on tuition, and he wasn’t afraid to walk away from the money he’d already sunk.

His life for the next several months wasn’t a glamorous one. He was broke so he slept on the floors of friends’ houses and paid for food by recycling Coke bottles. Each Sunday, he walked seven miles to the Hare Krishna temple to eat his one good (free) meal of the week. The upside to all this was that he was now free to experiment and study whatever interested him. He decided to take a class on calligraphy.

The class taught Jobs all about typography and the art and symmetry behind serif and sans-serif fonts, and he found it fascinating. He wasn’t looking to pursue it as a career, though. It was a one-off venture that he pursued purely out of curiosity, not for the sake of any external reward. He turned out to be very wrong about that, of course.

Ten years later, when Jobs and his friends were designing the first Macintosh computer, everything he had learned from his calligraphy class came back to him. Thanks to the concepts he’d learned, the Mac became the first personal computer to have multiple typefaces and fonts that were proportionally spaced.

Jobs later told an audience of college graduates:

“If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.” ³

I think one of the keys to a sane life for anyone is to connect the dots looking backward so that there is some sort of meaningful picture, a greater whole. You could argue that we will always find a way to connect the dots to justify our life choices, but I think what’s powerful about Jobs’s example is that he made good use of his knowledge and experiences in ways that he could not have foreseen, without fretting over whether dropping out of school or tinkering around with different side projects was going to “work out” or not.

“The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment,” Emerson writes. ⁴He’s referring to how humanity abandons old beliefs and practices for new ones, but I think this idea works on an individual level as well. To get where we want to go, or to a place even better than we’d planned to go, we must abandon old paths. There is joy to be found in unfinished dreams, it just takes some imagination to look for it.

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1. I should mention that part of this, no doubt, has to do with the fact that docenting is a 100% volunteer position.
2. From Human, All Too Human, #494. Hollingdale translation.
3. You can find the full story, along with the rest of Jobs’ speech, here
4. From his essay “Circles”