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- Exploring the yardstick, sunk costs, and progressive overload
Exploring the yardstick, sunk costs, and progressive overload
Logan
June 13, 2024
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Exploring the yardstick, sunk costs, and progressive overload
Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weekly newsletter — great work taking this small step to move your money forward. I’m Logan, a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’m excited you’re here!
What’s inside?
One tool to experiment with
Two quotes from others
Three questions to dig deeper
Four lines of poetry for the point
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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One tool to experiment with:
The Yardstick:
The standards you hold yourself to, the measures you take of yourself, dictate the quality of results you have.
How do you measure your days? How do you measure yourself? What matters?
These questions zero In on the yardstick you use to judge yourself — how you evaluate your own performance. And a stark realization sits right here: most of us don’t have any yardstick for ourselves, none that we’ve created at least. Any yardstick we might have is inherited from society or someone else — standards they’ve placed on us.
By expecting a standard level of performance and adhering to your standard — you’ll get the things you want, not the things someone else wants. The yardstick is your standard stick. A way to assess yourself and see how you stack up.
Money uncertainty convinces us to accept the standards that the confident money crowd issues. They build rigid rulers on the assembly line, manufactured for the masses, but not for you and me. We need something custom built, but this doesn’t mean we get easy standards.
Others’ standards give a convenient excuse to avoid doing the self-accountability that’s necessary to master your money.
Someone else might have a standard that they don’t waste money eating out — you can choose a different measurement. Why does their standard matter to you?
A recipe for unhappiness is measuring yourself with someone else’s ruler.
In order to adhere and have effective standards, there must be daily accountability to the standards. This is a short, systematic check-in with yourself, and it’s crucial to money success. The wait and see method won’t work. Think of each daily check-in as an opportunity to hold yourself accountable to your own standards. When you have that daily measurement in the back of your mind, you start to behave in a way that is aligned with your standards, and that’s the precise intent.
Impulse attacks everyone to some degree, and standards are the shield against the incoming arrows of impulse.
So, what money standards will you have for yourself?
set your own standards
Two quotes on sunk costs:
Sunk costs convince us to keep walking down the wrong path just because we’ve walked it for a long time.
“The sunk cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.”
“The sunk cost fallacy is most dangerous when we have invested a lot of time, money, energy, or love in something. This investment becomes a reason to carry on, even if we are dealing with a lost cause.”
Three questions on progressive overload:
Where can I dial the nob up to just a little more intensity? 1% more in an account, $10 extra a month?
Where have I been keeping the same level of intensity with my money?
Where am I adding too much, too quickly?
Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.
Four lines of poetry for the point:
The yardstick you choose,
Measures when you win or you lose.
Pass or fail, the level is clear,
But only when it’s your own standard to which you adhere.
Contact Me:
Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]
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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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