20 Months in, 2K Hours Spent and 200K € Lost. A Story About Resilience and the Sunk Cost Fallacy
TL;DR: It can be really hard to know if we’re just resilient or falling for the sunk cost fallacy.
I’ve been working for ~20 months on my current project, spent 2K hours on it, and “lost” 200K € by not doing something else. That project is not ready yet. Here’s the story behind it.
Update 2021–02–28: I posted a follow-up: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/21-months-in-and-80k-views-later-a01eb8a05898
Before it all
Early in 2018, after having worked for 10+ years as an employee, office politics got to me and I was tired of wasting time in meetings. I really wanted to quit, be my own boss, and have more impact on the world around me.
I was a tech lead/team manager/project manager, had a really good salary, lots of freedom, a cool team working together with me, and not that much to complain about, really. I could organize my days/weeks however I wanted, worked on interesting/challenging projects, and my team was really cool (alright, I already said that :p).
Still, I was willing to throw it all away to go and try something else, on my own terms.
