 So let's say it's Friday night and you want to go to the movies and you purchase the tickets say two months ago And on the day of the event you don't feel like going out and instead you want to stay home and chill paint read or Whatever else you want to do now Let's add more constraints and say that the movie ticket is non Refundable meaning that you cannot get your money back and also non transferable meaning that you cannot pass or donate the ticket to say a friend and considering that you are kind of sitting in between and Overall don't feel like going out and rather stay home Do you go to the movie anyway just to avoid losing the money attached to the ticket because normally a lot of people would say yes Right, you don't want to lose your money So you somehow find a way you get out of bed and go to the movies But we are kind of getting this wrong because the story the movie ticket story is actually a sunk cost fallacy the ticket is a sunk cost and this story is the most common example of the sunk cost fallacy Exemplification this helps us understand it better because this is something we resonate with and you might want to ask What exactly is a sunk cost in a nutshell a sunk cost is a cost that has already occurred and simply cannot be recovered If you don't want to lose the cost there's nothing else you can do except going and see the movie You are the only one who's gonna lose the theater still gets its cash It's money and if you go deeper the benefits of you staying home can cascade into multiple layers Meaning that people who do actually go to see the movie will benefit from you not being there As the place is going to be less crowded right with less people staying in line And you having a better chance of getting your favorite type of popcorn So in this position if you go and see the movie you are sort of not helping anyone and not even yourself because remember You don't actually want to go and see the movie in the first place And in this case understanding the sunk cost fallacy will help you create a new Gizmo a new gimmick that you can use to generate better solutions for future events And there are reasons to debate why this is not technically a fallacy But I'm not gonna go into that for now and what I'm trying to convey is that you should not consider that wasting something is okay in General but instead being more open to actually losing something and being more okay with it overall But developing a framework where you learn to avoid getting in a position where the most rational thing you can do is To waste stuff like our movie ticket example is a mental tool you can use to reduce your waste reduction Engagements, so how do you combat such a thing with the sunk cost fallacy running in the background sort of Begging you to keep doing what you're doing because you have invested the time and the money and energy And the more you invest the more links you add to the chain And the harder will be to break the chain and with losing being more painful than the delight of game Something you can do that's simple enough You can start paying more attention to how you make decisions and following this movie ticket example that was sort of recurring in the past You can start actually tracking these decisions and also their outcome so that you can also end up saying something like okay I bought ten movie tickets this year and out of these ten tickets. I ended up seeing Only five movies so the next time I want to buy a movie ticket I'm going to pay more attention to my process and more mindful on what my real intentions are I mean if you could foresee that after buying the movie ticket on the day of the show You would not feel the same hype as you had the day you decided to buy the ticket Would you still buy it because the sunk cost fallacy also outlines that your decision at a particular point in time can only be Justified by its immediate true cause so the moment you decided to actually buy the ticket two months in advance You were trying to inject Justification to fulfill an immediate cause so how do you improve this type of decision? How do you combine it and how do you sync it with your personal behavior? And one answer is by making a lot of bad decisions in the first place and based on those failures building feedback loops learning about how to screen yourself and better Understand your behavior so that you can build a strong foundation for plans that you can follow through and you will notice Things that you can optimize prove and do differently overall such as be more willing to abandon a project or Donate a piece of clothing that you recently bought but secretly hate or abandon a book if you are not enjoying it And you are 50 pages in or simply eating more than you can stomach simply because you pay for the food And there's actually one more thing you need to have some faith in your past decisions This sort of translates into you know picking up your sunk cost fallacy picking up your movie ticket and have faith in the Decision you made two months ago and have faith that you will be in the boot where you would like to go and see the actual Movie without any doubt and coming to a point where we can better say and knowledge that you do not have a strong enough cause a strong enough Basis to continue doing things that would probably have more importance over your future You will end up having a better set of lenses you can use to improve your future decisions