What Would You Choose Now If You Weren't Trying to Justify Your Previous Choices?

One of the hardest things to walk away from is something we've invested heavily in.

A career.

A relationship.

A business.

A house.

A professional identity.

A particular version of ourselves.

The more time, money and energy we've invested, the more powerful the urge to make the original decision continue to be right.

Psychologists and economists have a name for part of this: the sunk-cost effect.

But in a life, it can be particularly powerful because what we've invested isn't merely money.

It's years.

The past can quietly acquire a vote on the future

I've spent 25 years building this career.

We've lived here for 20 years.

I've worked so hard to achieve this.

All may be true.

But none, on its own, answers the question of whether you want to spend the next ten years doing it.

There is an important distinction between honouring what you've built and being governed by it.

Your previous choices don't need to have been mistakes for you to make different choices now.

A decision can have been completely right for the person you were at 35 and no longer be right for the person you are at 55.

Both things can be true.

Try removing the need for consistency

Imagine for a moment that you don't have to justify anything.

You don't have to prove that the choices you've made were correct.

You don't have to make your future look consistent with your past.

You don't have to continue something simply because you're good at it.

You are simply standing where you are today with everything you've learned and asking:

Knowing what I know now, what would I choose from here?

That question doesn't erase the past.

It puts it in its proper place.

Behind you as experience — rather than ahead of you as instruction.