Sometimes I catch myself thinking something I’ve thought a hundred times before, usually right before a decision I already know I need to make. I’ve been building Best Events Productions since 2008, and every time the market shifts, a trend fades, or a business model starts showing its age, some part of me whispers the same question. “Can’t I squeeze a bit more juice out of it? I’ve put so many years into this, so much money, so much of myself. Surely that has to count for something.”
It was reading Seth Godin’s piece on sunk costs that finally named what that whisper actually is. It isn’t loyalty, and it isn’t patience. It’s a very ordinary, very human refusal to let go of something simply because it was hard to earn in the first place.
The gift that isn’t an obligation
“Ignore sunk costs” is the critical lesson of useful decision making. The skills, the credentials, the business model you spent years perfecting, all of it is a gift from your past self. A law degree, a solid client list, the ability to run a drone conference. None of it is something your future self is obligated to keep accepting just because it once cost you dearly to acquire.
I think this is where a lot of people, myself included, get stuck. We hold on to old competencies and hard-earned roles far longer than we should, not because they still serve us, but because letting go feels like admitting the investment was wasted. It wasn’t wasted. It did its job. It got you here and here is not where you’re obligated to stay.
Why creativity demands a kind of abandonment
The only way to be creative is to do something new, and the path to something new requires leaving something else behind. You rarely get to be two people at once, the one who built the old thing and the one who builds the next.
In the twenty years of running BEP, I’ve watched this play out in real time. New decisions based on new information sit at the heart of good leadership but you can’t actually make those decisions while you’re still busy totalling up how much the old ones already cost you. The arithmetic of sunk cost and the arithmetic of creative judgment can’t run at the same time. One of them has to stop.
Creativity as generosity, not inspiration
Creativity is the generous act of solving an interesting problem on someone else’s behalf. It’s a willingness to take emotional and intellectual risks, not for your own glory, but because the problem in front of you matters and someone will benefit from a useful answer to it.
Do that often enough and it stops being a flash of inspiration and starts becoming a practice. Not because you were touched by a muse, but because you made a commitment, to the problems in front of you and to the people who stand to benefit from solving them well.
What this means for the way we work now
I think this lesson has gotten more urgent, in current times where so much of our thinking can be outsourced to an AI tool in seconds. It’s tempting to believe that creativity is about having the right prompt, the right process, the right shortcut. Creativity has very little to do with process and everything to do with what you’re willing to leave behind.
For those of us who are employed, that might mean admitting the skill that got you promoted isn’t the skill your role needs now. For the self employed, it might mean retiring a service you built your reputation on, even though it still pays the bills, because it no longer stretches you. For anyone easing into a quieter chapter of life, it might simply mean giving yourself permission to stop defending decisions made by a much younger version of you.
None of this is comfortable. Letting go of something you earned rarely is. But the alternative, carrying every past investment forward indefinitely, isn’t security. It’s just a slower way of standing still.
I’ve built a few creative led experiences around exactly this kind of letting go, places where people can set down what they’ve been carrying long enough to notice what wants to be made next. If you’re ready to get serious about your own creative practice, whatever form it takes, I hope you’ll explore what we’ve built.