Wasted Time and Dead Ends

I think anyone running a business spends a fair amount of time chasing down leads and opportunities that result in wasted time and dead ends.  I saw a Tik Tok, or a movie, where the guy was like I heard you need 30 no’s for every yes, so he saw every no as just closer to a yes, and it was all a numbers game.

It might really be a numbers game, and that number is the older you get, the larger the toll of dead ends is.  Resources are Finite. Recently I’ve hit some dead ends, which is nothing new, but the journey to get to those dead ends seemed elongated and prolonged, and 11th hour instead of early in the due diligence.

Because they were so 11th hour sputters, the ability to stay true to the ability to avoid the sunk cost sinkhole was pronounced.  It’s just not the money invested that will keep you moving wrongly in the wrong direction, but also the time invested, the vision advanced, project scope and filling the belly of the business beast- the employees, the subcontractors, paying to keep the lights on and the fixed costs paid.  You develop a relationship with the exercise, the asset being purchased, so when you pull the plug late in the planning stages, there is a sort of grief process to account for and to acknowledge.  And that works against drip drip drip of information gathered that is informing you of the increasingly dubious path you travelling - and since we move fast, and our resources - legal, engineering and surveying - are also fast, you need to be processing this information in real time - information that tells you to pause while you are galloping forward- hard to hear in the wind of progress, hard to hear in the wind of effort.

And then you have the fact that you have to admit to yourself and others that you bungled the idea, it wasn’t as good as it seemed.   As I navigate a few right now, with all the accumulated experience, cash flow, time and professionals around me, I cannot for the life of me figure out how I haven’t made the big mistake that was unrecoverable.  I guess I probably have, but have found a way through - maybe from effort, maybe from instinct, maybe because at my core, my ability evaluate and soldier on is real.  But for 25 years, I’ve been biting off more than I can chew and then just figuring it out, with time not on my side.

As we discussed, Sunk Costs Fallacy is the human nature tendency to continue on a path you are on since you’ve invested time and money, and the acknowledgement of an error is hard - it’s not hard for me anymore since to err is not only human, it’s common in my life, woven into each day.  Anyone who does something entrepreneurial is beset with error and failure - they actually guide the way, like life gives death its shape, failure gives success its very definition.

So once you have earned the ability to err and fail without long-term self-judgement, then the sunk cost fallacy trap is less likely since you are accustomed to keeping your ‘good ideas’ in check, double-checked, and proofed against the evolving reality of the information incoming. That's the competitive advantage at this point, and actually it's been true from the beginning - being modest in one's own estimation - the advantage is the modesty, of understanding from experience how wrong you can be in a business direction. You can't teach that - it has to be learned the hard way by experiencing it first-hand.

But that doesn’t change the fact that hitting dead ends, late in the process of execution, is a real heart break, and it’s tiresome, since a lot of times, the super hard work happens early in the process and then it sort of coasts a bit more once you get it rolling - the old ‘something in motion tends to stay in motion’ idea.  So to expend all the effort only to abort and hop off the train can wear you out, since there is no reward to exerting the experience of knowing when to abandon ship other than not going with the ship, it’s a quiet victory, like not doing something - like not buying that land, not hiring that person, not rolling the die - and too be honest, I think a long-term successful career in at least this business I’m in is about what you don’t chase as much as the out-of-the-park dingers. Quiet, un-noticed, solitary victories of avoiding disaster by opting out -engaging and leading with your strengths, like Matt Damon suckering John Malkovich into a gambling disaster by laying low, staying modest and coiled and prepared to spring.

Just finished this beautiful home on 18 acres in Catskill New York, just 10 minutes north of our Rivka project. On the River, looking fine indeed.