Letting Go of Sunk Costs

Many people have a hard time letting go of sunk costs. Not only that: people have a hard time recognizing that something is a sunk cost. Sunk costs are investments we have made in the past, but that we should no longer consider in our decision making going forward. Seth Godin writes in The Knot: A sunk cost is a gift from your former self. Your future self is not obligated to accept that gift. The only way to be creative is to do something new, and the path to something new requires leaving something else behind. (…) Time, effort, and money spent by the former you is simply a gift. A gift from the old you to the you of today. Like all gifts, you don’t have to accept it. * * * David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, gave the opening talk at the Rails World 2026 Conference in Austin. Rails is the programming framework for Ruby. It has a very loyal following among developers. Many notable web apps and platforms are written in Ruby on Rails. Most…