Sunk Cost Fallacy is a term I just heard recently but does it ever sound familiar, described as our tendency to follow through on an endeavor if we have already invested time, effort, or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits. In other words, I have already paid out all this money on this particular project and even though the project will not solve the problem I will keep on. This term embodies so many projects I have started over the years, particularly in the category of “I bought all these computer parts, I should use them to build something …” and the reason why my to do list of ideas keeps growing. Oh well, off to find another project …
Category: Vocabulary Corner
Imposter Syndrome
Imposter Syndrome is a term I heard thrown around a lot in years past, but I never knew what it meant, so I looked it up. Imposter Syndrome is defined as the self-doubt of intellect, skills, of accomplishments among high-achieving individuals. In other words, you might have a ton of experience and years of experience but still end up doubting your own abilities or worse insulting those abilities. I can see how this would feel as it feels like something I have experienced in the past on any number of situations in not only projects but also my career.
Fear of Missing Out
For a while now I’ve been saying that social media is more harmful than good .. Ok more than I have been saying it as the studies in this article written by the Sloan School of Management at MIT point out. One thing that social media always brings is people posting only the best, making others fear that they are missing out.
That was a stretch for an intro but “Fear of Missing Out” or FOMO was another term that I had heard a lot and never understood what it meant. I finally looked it up and I understand how it is harmful to ones mental health. The first article that I ran across when researching came from from verywellmind.com and begins the description of FOMO by calling out scrolling on social media and feeling like something is missing in one life. The next article from NIH.gov reinforces the definition of feeling like something is missing when in a social context and adds emotional compulsion to gain some thing or do some action to achieve the result of being just like those social media posts.
My problem has always been video games – I find that I want to play games with friends because I have seen said friends with a game and I do not want to be left out. Sometimes everything works out and we have fun playing a particular game. Other times though I will break patterns, stay up too late and cut into much needed sleep or worse never play the game with anyone and waste the money.
This was another random trip off the beaten path to look at the meaning of a term that was scratching that curious part of my brain. It was not a deep dive but, in the end something that I could say is a bad habit I have from time to time that I could do something about.
Over Saturated
Last week I mentioned I had another term to share – Task Saturation. I was clued into this term when I was reading a section of The Dichotomy of Leadership and an example of task saturation was given in the form of a story from a pre deployment training work up. During the story one of the SEALs became overwhelmed by the number of tasks that he needed to keep track of during the exercise.
I found the term most often related to pilots or piloting (one source written by a pilot, the other regarding piloting), which honestly makes sense seeing as you would have a lot to do while flying a plane. I think this quote from Eric Barfield sums up a neat definition, “Task saturation is having too much to do without enough time, tools or resources to do it.” Honestly though, task saturation can affect anyone really as we all so much we are doing on regular basis while getting peppered with distractions, phone calls, emails, various deadlines, et cetera … et cetera … et cetera.
Just because we get overwhelmed does not mean that everything is lost and the world is coming to an end. Organization, check lists, and offloading work will help relieve the stress and help bring order to the mental chaos. This list of steps from the Afterburner consulting or from Jocko himself will help bring sanity to the mental chaos.