BTG 187 - Abandon Ship

Hello and welcome to Breaking the Guard. On today's episode, I'm going to talk about the sunk cost fallacy or just being too locked in where you have a hard time seeing an alternative path. And this comes to mind for a few reasons, but mostly personal. I've had a frustrating week. As you can see, I'm still in this other room for the time being. Uh I talked about it, I think earlier in the week. I ended up flooding one of the rooms at my house and although it wasn't seriously damaged, there is stuff going on there. So, I have to wait until that's all fixed up. And uh that's one part of it. And then I've had several issues in the past few days where I was just hitting a dead end. And it's interesting because one of them, as you guys probably aware, AI is all over the place. I'm using it extensively now. on one of the projects I was working on, I hit a roadblock where between me and the AI, we weren't able to make any progress on one issue and it wasn't very complicated. It was a simple issue, but we just kept running into similar problems. And if I was to lay this out in uh architectural metaphor, we built on a foundation that wasn't solid and we kept trying to patch it up or duct tape it to make it work. And we got 90% of the way there. But at a certain point, I realized, man, this is we might be able to patch this up and make it work, but it's going to be ugly, and I don't want that because if we have to expand this feature later, it's going to implode. It won't be able to sustain. Despite that, I couldn't get the AI to let go of the original structure, and it kept trying to patch it despite me telling it, "Hey, let go of that. We got to rebuild." And ultimately, what I ended up doing was telling it, "Look, log everything that we've done. Talk about all the failures and successes we've had doing it this way, and let's create an extensive log." So, it'll be a good context because I'm going to start over with a new session and see what we get. Now, I wish I would have thought of this sooner because this was maybe like nine hours in on one session that got very little traction on. I I took a break maybe like an hour, came back and on the new session got it solved within five minutes because on the new session then the AI like fresh eyes of a human like oh that old approach was totally wrong we should have gone with this approach instead and everything worked on the first go smooth built much better so that I thought was interesting because it doesn't only happen to humans it also happens to the AI. Although for the AI it was easier to clear context because I could just type clear boom and it forgets everything that it happened before. Uh which would be handy in certain situations as a person that we we need more time than just you know trying to forget about something. We have to walk away from it. You know it could be 30 minutes, it could be an hour, it might be even a day before you can like let go of something and then okay how do we look at this differently? Uh but it wasn't a phenomenon that was just, you know, isolated to AI. And then I had another one that I was upset about today. Uh I was making ice cream. Not a serious thing. It's funny what gets me upset. Like my wife makes fun of me because they're like trivial things, but for me they're frustrating. But anyhow, I was making ice cream and I had all the ingredients mixed up. The last ingredient I was adding was milk. And I just put it in there. And when I started making it, something was smelling weird. Like I'm like, this is not the right smell. I'm like, ah, let's just keep going. But then I'm like, I wonder what it was. And I started smelling all the containers for the ingredients I added. And when it came to the milk, it was rancid. And it's weird because I just had it the day before and it was fine. So something weird happened there where it just turned overnight. But despite that, I'm like, "Well, let me see if I could cook it a little more. Maybe it won't be bad." But once I got into a second phase, I'm like, "No, this is not going to work." And I was like, "God damn it." Yeah. Uh, but I really wanted it to work. But it was very clear. And again, same type of thing. Foundation was garbage. It was rotten milk. It's not going to work. There's no way you're going to say that or like hide it. And this happens a lot in every aspect of life. I just shared too a work project and cooking, but especially in fighting or martial arts, you can end up in these type of scenarios as well where you get locked into a certain strategy or a certain technique and you won't let go of it. This can be just a one match problem or it could be a career problem depending on the issue. For example, some people will had this happen in a match. I've had it happen to me several times where I was so focused on doing one thing that I didn't realize I needed to change strategy until it was a little too late. Right? And it can be harder in combat when you're in the midst of it because if we didn't set the parameters right before and had the contingencies contingencies laid out, it takes some quick thinking to change. And I can remember one match where it bit me in the in the butt, which was with Travis Lutter. I approached every match in that rule set, the ultimate submission showdown, by pulling guard and then either scoring off my back or not allowing them to pass and in 3 minutes I would get a point and switch positions. It was a weird rule set. I'm not going to go into too much, but that worked with Travis on the first round. I got the first point, but on the second go, he found a hole in my guard that he was able to exploit. And within a minute, he had scored like 11 points. He got a guard pass, made it into a mount, got into a back take, and it was like three, four, four. Um, yeah. So I got him to the 11 and I realized too late like oh the guard strategy is not working on them. I got to do a different strategy and I was able to stretch the match out another 10 minutes but I had dug myself such a deep hole 11-1 that it I wasn't able to come back to win that one right but there are other cases where you see sometimes people are too hungry for a certain submission like they keep going for a heel hook right when the heel hook is not there or the opponent already knows about it easy to defend and they're going to block every attempt and every time you try it more the less effective it becomes the more desperate you're becoming. So being able to transition or to shift off of a particular strategy is important. And this also they sound like different things, but I I find that they work together with the sun cost fallacy. Sometimes you've put in so much time into something that you feel like no, like it just needs a little bit more. Like you've been playing, for example, this heel hook hungry game. you're locked into one strategy and you may have put so much time into training to doing it or you in the match you feel like I'm getting closer. I'm getting closer. I just need to put a little bit more time otherwise I wasted the first 3 minutes of the match. I got to validate this. And now you're running into like, well, this is more of an ego problem now versus a practicality, right? Or something that's pragmatic, which is if we know something's not working, throwing more good time to try to make the bad time worthwhile is not going to save you. You need to be able to shift and realize that, hey, look, I may have goofed the first, you know, half of the match. That's fine. I can still win this match if I play it right. But if I try to validate the first half of the match by playing the second match or the half the same and hoping it will change, I'm insane and I'm going to lose. So they tend to run together there. And again, this happens a lot in matches, but it could also happen a lot in training where people forget to play different games. Like they're so good at doing one thing, that's all they do. And uh as someone who likes specializing, you know, I can see how that could happen to me, I'm generally pretty good about that these days as I get to play around a lot more. Uh but I still do lots of kimoras, but I don't spam it as much as I used to. There was a point where I would just non-stop go for it and people would be highly irritated. However, it was working for me in the training room. So, it it wasn't invalid. But, um, as far as growth and progression, you could somewhat stagnate if all you do is the same thing over and over again. There's diminishing returns, you know, going down one path. So you have to be able to let go of certain strategies or certain positions or certain techniques and be able to move on to something else in order to achieve true growth. So I'm pretty conscious of that as you guys know as I journal. I do lots of things so I'm able to catch things that I am grinding into too much. But uh I know some people that play the same game forever. They don't seem to ever change. And I'll notice because I keep doing better against them and it's because I've continued to adapt whereas they and I'm playing different strategies and whatnot and they just keep playing the same thing. So, of course, over time, I'm going to win because I'm learning your game better at a quicker rate, then your game is getting better because your game might have been novel to me when I first came across it, but now it's not and I'm able to catch up a lot quicker. Whereas, you've been doing the same game forever and now it's harder for you to grow to a point where you're going to catch me off guard. And I'm also working lots of new things. So I have many different ways to attack you now where you're using the same path. So it's important from not just a competition standpoint, arguably more important in the training room being able to know like there's times where I can give up on certain things. And sometimes people have a hard time with that. Like if for example you are the guy who's really good at let's say kimoras and you used to catch somebody all the time with kimoras and now all of a sudden you can't. Now you're like well I got to figure out how to do it and keep trying to grind and force this game. Now, there's some merit to doing that, but at a certain point, you have to realize that, well, maybe now I should be focusing on other aspects because the defense from this particular opponent has gotten really high. So, I should explore other ways of attacking instead, right? Not being too locked in on one particular strategy, one type of game. Again, this to me is kind of similar to sunk cost where words like I put so much time into the strategy or I love the strategy so much that I don't want to let go of it when the most practical thing to do would be move on to another one. Uh so I feel like these two things can come together. Not just being too focused on one path, but also I I think part of that is because you've have so much attachment to that whether it's emotional or time investment or whatever it is that you don't want to stop doing it. But there I can tell you from many examples that it's going to hurt you long term to do such a thing. and instead you have to be able to pivot. Uh in fact I have a one of my nephews uh he had a a similar runin which I tried to explain as well which you know he wanted to become a coder and now coding is sort of falling off because of all this AI stuff coming through and you can be either frustrated or resentful like oh you know like I had this career path I wanted to follow and now it's not going to exist for me and I and I don't want to do this AI stuff, I wanted to do this instead where I would tell you if you're in an industry that's moving quickly and obviously tech is the fastest moving industry that I know of, right? It's evolving constantly. I mean, if you just look at this one tiny sector of AI from one month to the next, it's a different game. Uh, and that's only continuing to become grow faster. Like tech hasn't slowed down. It's it's sped up in just about every area. So if you're in an industry like that that is moving very quickly, you can't expect to stay in the same lane and be able to make progress. Like one of the things I told him like if we were living two 300 years ago, maybe 500 years ago, and we were a blacksmith, we could probably be pretty stable in learning our trade and not having to expand too much. I mean, we'll get better, like, you know, 1% 2% better skills and maybe have some novel techniques that we develop, but for the most part, our typical trades probably going to stay about the same for the duration of our lifetime. Whereas in tech, in the span of a couple years, whatever you learned might be obsolete already. So in an industry that's moving that quickly, we have to constantly be learning. We're always a student or or always adapting, right? And the people who don't adapt get left behind and ultimately they're going to have to do something else entirely anyways or live on the street. So if you're going to put yourself in an industry that evolves very quickly, you have to be willing to evolve with it and be able to pivot. And this is where again another sunk cost fallacy might fall into play or just emotional attachment where it's like, oh, you know, I put in 10 years of my career into programming and now it's gone. It's like, well, you can cry about this spilled milk or you can move on to something else. And your skills normally don't completely become obsolete. They just have to be rolled up into a different uh fashion. So this happens in in everything I feel like. So in the martial arts, we bring this all back when we have a particular skill set that we are proud of or that we have a lot of attachment to and we start running into lots of problems with it. The answer is always not like, "Oh, we just got to keep doing it and get better at it." Sometimes the answer is, "Let go of that. Let's move on to something else." And you'll find, especially in combat, that when you do that, you might strengthen your ability to use the old skill set because now you have another one that will complement it. Example, for me, if I'm big into kimoras, I'm like, "Man, I can't finish anybody with kimoras anymore." Well, now from the kimora, I go into the arm bar or I go into the triangle or I go into the head scissor or I attack with the armbar first and then when they defend then I switch to a kimora, right? So like there's a lot of ways that you can come back to it. So it's not like you have to throw the skill set away. You just have to put it on the back pocket, let something else lead, and then return to it. And being able to have this type of skill where you can pivot is important not only for training but like I said also especially for competition because sometimes our best late plans go to waste, right? We get out there and the battlefield is very different than we imagined it. And being able to shift quickly will save you, right? Like you may come in there and you realize within the first minute your strategy was wrong. the game plan we didn't plan right or the opponent brought in a lot of new skills that we weren't ready for. If we're able to pivot quickly to address those, we can still win this thing. And I found that some of the best competitors are not only great at being good uh tacticians and being able to recognize the right path to winning, but also when they do encounter difficulty that they're able to pivot quickly and re keep on top, right? Don't get left behind or don't don't lag like they adjust. That's a skill I always admired because uh being honest, that's hasn't always been a strong point of mine. Uh I am stubborn so I will try to force the circle into the square hole. Uh you know having that stubbornness and persistence is good in some capacity but if I'm able to direct that same type of energy in a more useful way it would be a lot better. Anyhow hopefully u sharing these lessons that I've been reminded of this week will be useful for you. I'll catch up with you guys next