I remember watching Space Jam as a kid.
The opening scene was that of a young Michael Jordan shooting a basketball in his backyard. His dad comes out and tells him it’s time to get in the house. Michael wants to continue practicing his shot and his dad tells him to shoot the ball until he misses and from what I remember, he didn’t miss… the movie fades into opening credits.
Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time (sorry King James fans) and just like in that opening scene he overcommitted to his dreams.
This is a movie, I get it, but — I want to tie it to the psychology of escalation of commitment.
Michael overcommitted to training as we see it told in this opening scene — go read about it some more in Tim Grover’s book Relentless. Michael was committed.
The point is that very few of us will be the Michael Jordan of our industry.
We also have dreams and we work hard at them but we may get caught in a situation where investing more time, energy or money is not the right decision.
The escalation of commitment is what happens when the road we are on is not good and we want to make up for the investment (sunk cost) we already made — we continue to commit resources to this bad course of action.
We have to be able to cut the losses at one point and move on — Michael did this — baseball.
The Greatest Of All Time, experienced escalation of commitment for a moment and he cut the losses.
You can argue that he would have become a great baseball player as well — but we will stick to what happened.
Imagine you are off-track then one day you wake up, you cut the losses and you move back into a more fruitful path as you tell everyone — “I’m Back.”