Sunken cost fallacy
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
Back in July 2023, I began my fifth year of daily practice to nail the song Bleed by Meshuggah on the drums, as a beginner drummer. The insanity of this project is of epic proportions, which can be verified by anyone who has ever heard the original. Many people have asked how I am able to be so consistent with my practice, and if I interpret them correctly, it seems like they would have given up long ago. However, I have finally reached the stage where I cannot keep up my 15 minutes per day. It is simply too difficult. That’s why I have now decided to double my efforts.
It would have been very satisfying to nail the song in just 15 minutes per day. That way, I could have calculated exactly how long it took when I finally learned the song. That’s the number one reason that I stayed at 15 min per day. But the urge to get it done has grown in me, and now I am seriously hungry to play something else. When closing in on a target like this, the time required to learn the final 1% is probably just as long as the first 99% combined. I think that is why it has felt more or less stagnant for the past 6-9 months. The incremental growth is there of course, but the slope of the curve is now so slow, that I am probably the only one noticing any change at all. To give up has never been an option. If it had been, I would never have started this project in the first place. It shall be done, or I will die trying. Consequently, a couple of days ago I changed the rules of the game. From now on it isn’t 15 min per day anymore. The new target is 2x15 min per day, but I am allowed to reduce it to 15 min per day if life requires it. So, the rules are exactly the same as before, except that I am now allowed to keep playing even after my 15 min timer rings.
A friend of mine brought up the topic of “Sunken cost fallacy” the other day, which I was not familiar with. It is a valid point, and it was a healthy exercise to challenge myself why I am so committed to this insane project of learning one of the most difficult songs in the world, as a beginner. I could come up with several reasons. The first one is that there are few, if any, sweeter pleasures in this world than people explaining to me how it is impossible and that “I will never become a drummer”. I love that. Talk about barking up the wrong tree. This is where I get most of my energy, from these haters or whatever you choose to call them. I love those guys. Without them, there would be much less joy in my life. The second reason is that I am hell bent on proving to the world what can be done with just 15 minutes per day. If I can learn Bleed in 1 hour and 45 minutes per week, just imagine what you too could achieve by spending a similar or larger amount of time scratching away life on your smartphone. It works both ways. Exponential growth works in both directions. Never forget that. And I want to demonstrate this to my boys. They shall look at their old man and see what I did. A complete novice on the drums five years ago, and in less than 2 hours per week I have already reached beyond the 95th percentile of humanity with regards to drumming skills (I include every breathing human in that normal distribution). They can do it too, in their skill of choice. I wish I had learned this 15-minute/incremental improvement lesson as a kid. My life would have been very different today had I chosen to do so.
A third reason is that I have aways wanted to play the drums, but I never got a drum kit as a kid. There’s a whole lot of Freud here. The more you suppress something, the more it comes back with a vengeance later in life. I am living, drumming, proof of that.
And the fourth thing that came to mind was, “What else am I supposed to do anyway?”. Practicing the drums is just like walking my dogs. It is not always enjoyable. You must walk your dogs, regardless of the weather. No one in their right mind would be thrilled about going outside in blistering rain, for example. But I have never, ever returned home from a walk and felt worse than before I left. This is as certain as the sun rising in the east. You will always feel a little bit better after a walk. Period. And that’s precisely how I feel after each drum session. When the egg timer rings, I know that I have just spent 15 minutes improving my own life and the life of everyone else around me. Improving yourself improves the world. And I am not perfect, far from it. I have plenty of vices and bad habits that I without a doubt spend more than 15 minutes per day on. You know, those things where your inner voice tells you “Don’t do that”. You know you shouldn’t do that. And then you go ahead and do it anyway. If I should give up on Bleed, it will be after I have gotten rid of all my bad habits first. Then, and only then, can I start to consider the sunken cost fallacy. But even then, I would arrive at the same conclusion, i.e. to proceed no matter what happens, until it is done. I have visualized myself playing the song perfectly, and I already know how great it will feel when everything clicks into place. And now I have finished writing this post. Time to set the egg timer on 30 minutes and beat the **** out of my drums. See ya!