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

So, 20 years later, I did exactly that.

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 3D-printed dresses by Iris van Herpen to Baroque paintings to artifacts from the ancient city of Teotihuacan — one of our favorite exhibits was a line-up of famous race cars. These unpretentious kids 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 then I quit.

No, it wasn’t sudden. There was no crisis, no tragedy. 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 for months, like a dull ache in my joints. I tried to ignore it at first. I’d spent so much time and energy that it felt embarassing 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 wouldn’t be continuing. I walked away without a second thought.

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: “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, 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. They may not even have a clear goal in the first place.

These are the situations that make 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 to do most with the precious, limited days I had left on Planet Earth.

The “sunk cost effect” is usually cited as an example of flawed and illogical humans are. I think this negative focus makes the problem worse because we humans don’t like to admit we’re illogical in the first place. There is, in fact, a 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.

I’ll use the example of the Phoenix Art Museum. During those three busy years, I spent a lot of time standing in front of an audience, having meaningful conversations with strangers — it was almost like 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. I learned how to handle awkward conversations and respond to questions when I didn’t know the answer, plus many other “soft skills” that I’ve since been able to implement in my life in ways I could never have planned or predicted.

For all these reasons and more, I don’t consider my docent years a “waste.” Nor any other ventures that I’ve abandoned. I’ve found that life is rarely straightforward and once we embrace this, life starts making a lot more sense.

Connecting the dots looking backwards

The path to the goal, for most of us, isn’t clear. It’s often winding and roundabout, full of sharp turns slippery pebbles but also of 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?

We like to look to others for inspiration, and other people’s success stories tend to look simpler in hindsight. I’m also convinced 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.

Take 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 to the next generation. Some sports are more flexible than others when it comes to how old you have to be (think of rowing versus gymnastics, for example), but either way there are still precise requirements and a logical progression that doesn’t allow you to stray too far onto a different path.

But most of us don’t fit this example. We may have strong interests or even a goal when we’re young, but there’s no roadmap. This is true for a lot of careers, but even more so for novel experiences and things like relationships. It’s only through trial and error — beautiful, delightful, sometimes mortifying error — that we figure out what we really want. Think of Leo Tolstoy, the debauched gambler and soldier who matured into Russia’s most famous novelist. Or Ed Witten, who tried his hand at political journalism before becoming of the most famous theoretical physicists of all time.

There are countless examples of “successful sunk costs” I could add to the list, but few of them are more perfect then Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple.

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.

For the next several months, Jobs 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. He found it fascinating; for him, it was a one-off venture that he pursued purely out of curiosity, not for the sake of getting from point A to point B. He had no expectation that learning calligraphy would become an invaluable asset. 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. As a direct result, 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 [of college], 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’m convinced that one of the keys to a sane life is the ability to connect the dots looking backward so that you have a more meaningful picture of your life. You could argue, rather cynically, that we connect the dots to justify our life choices whether good or bad. There is some truth to that. But what is powerful about Jobs’s example is that he made use of his knowledge and experiences without knowing what that would like ahead of time. He didn’t sit next to his empty Coke bottles fretting over the sunk costs of dropping out of school.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment,” ⁴He’s referring to how humanity abandons old beliefs and practices for new ones; I think this same idea is every bit as true at an individual level. To get where we want to go, or to a place even better than we’d planned to go, we must abandon old paths. We must allow ourselves to tinker around and explore the things that won’t leave us alone. There is joy to be found in unfinished dreams; what’s non-negotiable is having imagination.

Look for the hidden joys of your sunk costs.

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1. I should note that being a docent is a 100% voluntary 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”