At My Zen Path, I’m rethinking work and life all the time – challenging the way we think about work, life, and our work-life balance. So it is not a surprise that I liked this video that encourages us to rethink what we are doing periodically.
Adam Grant is a well-known American organizational psychologist that I follow with some interest, and I have shared his work here on multiple occasions. In this TED talk ‘What frogs in hot water can teach us about thinking again’, Grant cites some of his own examples as a young diving-enthusiast, as a Wharton professor to emphasize importance of rethinking where we are headed. This is what he says about sticking around –
There’s a name for this kind of mistake, it’s called “escalation of commitment to a losing course of action.” It happens when you make an initial investment of time or money, and then you find out it might have been a bad choice, but instead of rethinking it, you double down and invest more. You want to prove to yourself and everyone else that you made a good decision. Escalation of commitment explains so many familiar examples of businesses plummeting. Blockbuster, BlackBerry, Kodak. Leaders just kept simmering in their slow-boiling pots, failing to rethink their strategies. Escalation of commitment explains why you might have stuck around too long in a miserable job, why you’ve probably waited for a table way too long at a restaurant and why you might have hung on to a bad relationship long after your friends encouraged you to leave.
It’s hard to admit that we were wrong and that we might have even wasted years of our lives. So we tell ourselves, “If I just try harder, I can turn this around.”
Watch it here –
For me this is what stayed from his talk –
We live in a world that mistakes confidence for competence, that pressures us to favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, that accuses people who change their minds of flip-flopping, when in fact, they might be learning. So let’s talk about how to make rethinking the norm.
It helps to rethink our assumptions, status-quo, inertia or “that’s how it has always been done/that’s what everyone is doing” and all that. Sometimes we fight it out with out grit, sometimes we salvage ourselves when we quit. 🙂
Featured Image:
The featured image used for this article is by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay, and I am using it here with gratitude.
