{"id":14049,"date":"2012-10-31T17:12:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-31T17:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/80000hours.org\/2012\/10\/sunk-costs-in-careers\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T15:05:29","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T15:05:29","slug":"sunk-costs-in-careers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/80000hours.org\/2012\/10\/sunk-costs-in-careers\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunk Costs in Careers"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post we looked at sunk costs<\/a>. We saw that having paid for something distorts how you think about it later on.<\/p>\n

This is a very common experience in career decisions. You might be in a degree course you don’t want to be on, or climbing the ladder in a company you aren’t sure about, or find out that the dream job you’ve spent years working for isn’t as good as expected. It is only by forgetting these sunk costs that you can make the right career decisions and have as much impact as you can.<\/p>\n

If you find yourself in this situation what can you do?<\/p>\n

Rejecting sunk costs<\/h2>\n

Mark Lee<\/a> was working to become a high-impact philosopher<\/a>, he already had a batchelor’s degree and was working towards a PhD. Then he learned about earning to give<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On paper Mark was faced with an tricky decision: what would do more good, doing philosophy, or training as a lawyer and doing earning to give? It’s a tricky decision, but it’s at least possible to think through the different ways those careers will do good, and to estimate how much good they are likely to do.<\/p>\n

In practice that decision was much harder. Those years of work getting his degree were a huge cost. To abandon that work (letting that work be in vain) would be painful for most people, which would make it hard to reliably make the right decision. If you’ve already worked to get something, you’ll think it was a better choice than if you hadn’t.<\/strong> 1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

How could Mark have overcome this bias and make a rational decision about his future career?<\/p>\n

Fighting the sunk cost bias<\/h2>\n

Correcting this bias is hard, but it can be done. If you follow this simple 3 step process the evidence suggests you will find it easier to make rational decisions.<\/p>\n

1) Present: Assess your current situation without talking about the past.<\/h3>\n

Talk through what you have now, all the knowledge, all the qualifications, all the things that give you access to something else. But don’t think about how you got them, pretend that process was just an accident.<\/p>\n

2) Future: Talk about the future costs\/benefits of your options.<\/h3>\n

Once you know where you are talk about where you can go. Make a list of the costs from now on<\/strong> of each option, and a list of all the benefits from now on<\/strong> of each option.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

3) Justify: Explain these future cost\/benefits to someone else and justify your decision to them<\/h3>\n

Get someone else, like an 80,000 hours advisor, to talk through the decision with you. If you understand sunk costs then you are likely to find it hard to justify biased decisions to someone else.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

So for Mark’s decision the process could look something like this:<\/p>\n