31st August, 2021
The seemingly perpetual lack of sleep endowed by parenthood leaves me so exhausted some days that I feel like giving up. I don’t…but I sure as sh*t feel like it.

For times in the lab and doing research where that same creeping feeling of futility arises, awareness of two interconnect concepts have helped to no end.

The Dip - as coined by marketer and author Seth Godin - refers to those times, during any project, where you feel like there’s no point in going on. You feel like you can’t do it, you’re not good enough, it's all been a waste of time, there’s no end in sight, no sign of success. This most terrible of troughs triggers the height of your temptation to burn all your bridges between here…and the possible there. Yet, with small consistent efforts, the Dip can be scaled and escaped from. Only with that guttural grind will all your efforts bear the fruit you crave when you’re at your most ravenous.

I’ve sketched out one version of the Dip in this Daily Thought.

There is a sister concept that is just as valuable and arguably far less intuitive than the Dip. Understanding your sunk costs and the Sunk Cost Fallacy can help you focus or even realign your efforts on more fruitful pursuits. The concept is spoken about in the same breath as the Dip, and also in the works of, for example, Daniel Kahneman. The Sunk Cost Fallacy identifies those efforts and investments you’ve made that are clearly going nowhere productive. Yet, given how much time or effort or money you’ve ploughed into the project, you cling onto it in a hope beyond hope. You are blinded to the brutal fact that it would be better to give up and reinvest your energy elsewhere.

Understanding the Dip has helped me through times of rejection and catastrophically chaotic projects that just needed a small consistent push every day to get beyond the low point. By the same chord, it has become more comfortable to let entire research programmes go up in smoke in the knowledge that those ideas where being executed expertly by other, more competitively resourced teams at a time when it made no sense for me to play second fiddle or runner up. Such sunk costs became a gift from past efforts to spot new albeit risky opportunities to pivot to pastures new. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I hadn’t first gained the awareness of the counterintuitive value of letting some things go.

So, where are the low points in which you realize its a Dip and you need to push on through?

And what are the sunk costs you’re holding onto that mgiht be holding you back from greater things?

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