There’s a particular kind of wiring in my system that seems to say: Keep going. Don’t quit. Push through. Finish what you started.
Persistence is one of those qualities we almost universally admire. Nobody makes inspirational posters that say, You’ve invested enough in this. It’s time to reconsider.
But lately I’ve been wondering whether I’ve made persistence so virtuous that I sometimes forget to ask a rather obvious question: Is this still worth doing?
There is a famous example from aviation history that eventually gave a psychological trap its nickname: the “Concorde fallacy.”
Britain and France set out to build Concorde, a supersonic passenger aircraft that could cross the Atlantic in roughly half the usual flying time. It was futuristic, beautiful, and technologically audacious. It was also extremely expensive.
As the project continued, costs climbed far beyond early estimates. Yet enormous amounts of money had already been invested. Walking away became harder precisely because so much had already been spent.
And that’s the trap. We think: I’ve already invested so much time in this. I’ve already spent so much money. I worked too hard to get here. I can’t quit now. But none of those thoughts actually answer the question of whether what comes next is worth the cost.
Psychologists and economists call this the sunk-cost fallacy. We allow what we’ve already invested, and cannot recover, to influence whether we continue investing.
It sounds fairly obvious when we’re talking about governments and airplanes. It becomes less obvious when the investment is personal. A long career. A relationship we’ve invested years in. A house we’ve lived in for a long time. The investment is more than time and money. It’s effort, reputation, pride, identity.
We’ve decided what we’re going to do. We’ve worked toward it for a long time. Changing our mind can then feel like failure.
So we reach for more discipline. We make another schedule. Download another productivity app. Wake up even earlier. Give ourselves stern little speeches. Tell ourselves to stop procrastinating.
And sometimes, that’s exactly what it takes.
I don’t want to turn resistance into some mystical oracle that always knows better. Sometimes I don’t want to exercise because the sofa is comfortable. Sometimes that thing I said I would do takes a lot of my energy and I’m feeling damn tired.
Not all resistance is the same. Sometimes we resist something because it’s hard. Sometimes because we’re afraid. Sometimes because we’re avoiding something else. And sometimes because, somewhere along the way, the reason we were doing it disappeared.
All of those can feel remarkably similar from the inside. And that’s what makes it so difficult to know what we’re actually dealing with and what to do next.
So how do you know whether you’re giving up too soon or staying too long?
Or whether you simply need to change the way you’re going about it?