Monday, October 27, 2008

The "Too-Much-Invested-To-Quit Syndrome"

Stubbornness and greed sometimes lead us to follow training paths for too long, despite all the warning signs telling us to change direction. I talked about this a bit in "Knowing When To Say When" and "Thoughts On Deloading". Dr. Robert Sutton takes this a step further and very aptly calls this the "Too-Much-Invested-To-Quit Syndrome".

"The more time and effort that people put into anything - no matter how useless, dysfunctional, or downright stupid it may be - the harder it is for them to walk away... We all justify the time, effort, suffering, and years and years that we devote to something by telling ourselves and others that there must be something worthwhile and important about it or we never would have sunk so much of our lives into it."

- Robert Sutton, PhD (The No Asshole Rule)


Excellent stuff and great advice for people who trudge along for months or even years using the same system, split, routine, diet, scam, or scheme, waiting for their progress to, at some point, suddenly take off. Understand, I'm not talking about consistency here. I'm talking about blind adherence to a program despite a preponderance of evidence that it isn't meeting your needs.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

This is me and my work-schedule. Everyone from Pavel to my wife has been telling me to reevaluate, but it wasn't until this week that it REALLY hit me.

Great post, as always, Boris-san!

Boris said...

There's a lot to be said for sticking it out sometimes but being hardstyle and all, we probably "grind" it out a longer than we should sometimes... ;)

Thanks Doc - I think if Pavel and your wife are giving you the same advice, it's got to be good!

Boris said...

Oh, and if it wasn't clear enough, this is another one of those "Reminder To Self..." posts. I'll start labeling them as such from now on.