When choosing how to spend your business development time, and where to make further investments of effort, resources, and money, be careful not to fall into the traps around sunk investments.
Sunk investments - or "sunk costs" - are those past allocations of time, money, energy, and emotion which are now irrecoverable.
It's easy to allow current thinking and future choices to be dominated by past decisions. Humans have a strong bias to continue to make decisions which justify earlier choices, irrespective of the validity of those past decisions.
What we've previously invested in pursuing an opportunity may be largely irrelevant to what we should do in the future. Because we're often unwilling to recognise our previous poor decisionmaking - or, downright mistakes - those problems are perpetuated and may even proliferate.
That is, we keep accumulating evidence supportive of our past decisions, and too often look past contrary indicators. We're not good at "cutting our losses" and fall victim to sunk investment.
It may be costly or difficult to acknowledge poor decisions earlier on. Colleagues may criticise. Admitting poor judgement or wrong decisions has a personal psychological cost, too.
However, not coming to terms with sunk investment is a bigger problem. Unless you work out that it's time to cut your losses and move onto the next opportunity, you're destined to squander more time and resources and still fail.
Not even the best professional business developer gets every investment decision right. Even really good decisionmaking may not produce the expected return. Once you accept that, you can move on and avoid the "quicksand" of sunk investment.
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