One of my proudest professional accomplishments is a weird one: I convinced a handful of colleagues to just give up.
We were in a brainstorming session trying to solve a problem that had been giving us trouble for some time. We must have run through a half-dozen solutions, each more convoluted than the last, essentially trying to figure out how to fit a square peg into a round hole.
The real problem, we finally realized, wasn’t the one we were trying to solve. It was that we were so focused on finding a solution that we never stopped to question whether we should even be doing the thing causing us problems in the first place. The solution we were too tunnel-visioned to see turned out to be the simplest: Just stop doing that thing. Duh. …NYT
Compounding the problem is that we sometimes force ourselves to stick with failing endeavors — even if we’re fully aware they’re failing — because we’ve already invested so much time in them. In one studythat examined this phenomenon (known as the sunk cost fallacy)