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Make things better by making better things.
You just finished 10 years of medical school, accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and now realize you don’t want to be a doctor, what do you do?
You can’t get your ten years of time, effort, energy and money back. It is gone. You spent it. However…
You get to decide what you want to do next.
Understanding sunk costs, seeing when you have made a wrong decision and are fighting to make a square peg fit in a round hole–that is extremely difficult thing to do. Most of us don’t want to admit we are wrong.
That is why it took Semmelweis 20 years to convince doctors to adopt the practice of washing their hands after it was first introduced.
Change creates friction and inevitably there is a price to pay for it. It might mean uprooting your life. More likely, it is looking in the mirror and admitting, “I made a mistake.”
Mistakes are not a bad thing when dealing with incomplete information. Knowing what you know now you can make a better decision. Sometimes you need to make the journey up the road to realize this is a dead end.