One day, you may find yourself in a pet store looking for a pet for your teenage son or daughter.

And you'll encounter the green iguana, an adorable little lizard that doesn't eat bugs or mice or anything that lives in cedar.

It's an herbivore. They're not very expensive, and it's possible that you will buy a green iguana.

Not knowing that in several months, this adorable little lizard will be five feet long.

Hey, it's Kevin Beach, and this is a special archived episode of Akembo.

Knowing what you now know about green iguanas, if a friend came up to you one day and said,

hey, my green iguana just had a bunch of little green iguanas, do you want a little baby green iguana?

For free, my guess is that you're smart enough to say, no thank you.

No thank you. I don't want a pet lizard no matter how cute that's going to grow to be five feet long and more than 20 pounds.

And wait, no thanks. That's pretty obvious. Here's the interesting thing.

The interesting thing is if you lived in Belize or Paraguay or Brazil, a country where green iguanas are indigenous,

and you owned a green iguana, a green iguana that was growing like a rocket.

Would you keep it? Would you keep it forever? Or would you take it to the local rainforest and let them go?

One of the things that has driven our culture, one of the things that's hardwired into us, into mice, into rats, into most intelligent creatures that have evolved,

is the fact that sunk costs are a real problem.

On costs, the idea that we stick with something, particularly if we put a lot of time or effort into getting that thing,

and money has magnified the way we think about sunk costs.

In this short podcast, I want to help you rethink all the sunk costs in your life and understand the two factors that get in the way of us making better decisions.

So what do I mean by a sunk cost?

If something happened yesterday, or a week ago, or a month ago, or a year ago, something that cost you time or effort,

it's sunk. You can't get that time or effort back. It's over.

What you're left with is what you're left with, and now you need to make a new decision.

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