How to Rethink a Bad Decision

Worklife with Adam Grant

TED

Management, Worklife Podcast, Worklife With Adam Grant, Work Life Balance, Ted Talks, Podcast About Work Life, Ted Adam Grant, Adam Grant Podcasts, Ted Podcasts, Adam Grant, Organizational Psychologist, Business

4.8 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In life and work, we have a hard time changing course. When we wind up in a miserable job, a failing project, or a floundering romantic relationship, we rationalize, make excuses, and stick with our bad decisions—even when the writing's on the wall. Why? Usually we assume the driving force is sunk costs: we don't want to admit we've wasted that time or money. But in fact, the root of our stubbornness is a psychological trap called “escalation of commitment.” Once we understand that, we can start taking steps to protect ourselves from… well, ourselves. WorkLife is made possible with the support of LinkedIn, Logitech, Morgan Stanley, SAP, and Verizon.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We've all dug ourselves into some holes that were hard to dig out of
0:04.0	Especially at the urging of good friends. She knocked on my door to my room
0:08.1	Which she never does so I knew something was up and she was like hey?
0:12.0	We're a person down everyone's gonna go. You're gonna be so upset that you missed risk
0:16.8	That's my student Alexis. This was the second time her friend asked her to go to a trendy new festival
0:22.3	So she couldn't turn her down again
0:24.5	But as soon as she said yes, things started to go downhill
0:28.6	Not only did my friends not have any details about the event
0:32.5	But even the contact that we made with the organizers of the event seemed pretty
0:38.2	Sparse on the details as well. So I was already feeling a bit
0:43.0	uneasy about what was happening
0:45.2	But it felt like I'd already made that public commitment to our group to go
0:49.8	We'd already paid for our flights to Miami and those were non-refundable
0:54.1	Even as Alexis and her friends were boarding the plane things kept getting worse
0:59.2	We got on the plane which
1:01.2	Strike three and I was on my phone because I found a Twitter account saying that people had started arriving and didn't have housing
1:08.8	And didn't have any food
1:10.8	Turns out that festival her friends were obsessing about was one of the biggest frauds of 2017 fire festival
1:17.2	All these models like in the Bahamas the most insane festival the world has ever seen
1:24.4	Island getaway turned disaster it became very far bearing
1:28.8	When we got to the island of course as most people know now nothing was as promised
1:35.0	We were not in luxury
	...

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