Last week my wife and I went on holiday to Amsterdam to celebrate our anniversary and my birthday. On arrival, we planned to take a train from the airport in Schiphol to the central station in Amsterdam, and then walk from the central station to our hotel. The walk would take about 45 minutes according to Google Maps, which is a piece of cake if you're like me, or a bit of a long walk if you're a normal person who's been travelling all day and just wants to get to the hotel as quickly as possible. Still, the walk would be a good way to start sightseeing on the first day in Amsterdam, at least that was our rationale.
After landing in Schiphol, going through border control, and getting our bearings, we looked around for information on the trains, bought our tickets, and headed for the platform from which the next train would depart to the central station. The train heading for the central station arrived minutes later. We hopped on, excited to be on our last leg of the journey and looking forward to seeing all that Amsterdam has to offer. As the train left Schiphol, I gazed out of the windows on the top deck of the double-decker locomotive and took in the sights of the tulips in the fields. By this point, we decided to check the best route on the map to walk to our hotel from the central station we were heading to. Except, the map showed the starting point as our current location instead of the central station, and the map stated that it would take 12 hours to walk from where we were – on the train, heading to the station – to our hotel.
This didn’t make sense. If we were headed towards the central station, then our ETA would have been not far off the 45 minutes we thought it would take. We looked at the map again, still set to our current location, only to see that the ETA was still 12 hours and rising. By this point, we started considering the possibilities. Maybe this was just a glitch on the map. Maybe the map or the phone’s GPS struggled to get our bearings because we were on a fast-moving train. If this was the case, we could simply wait to get to our destination, and then check our route again on the map, and all would be right with the world.
But there was another possibility. Maybe we were headed in the wrong direction, maybe we got on the wrong train. We did some googling, checked the tickets we’d bought, and the information panel on the train we were on, and only then did we realise that we were in fact on the wrong train, travelling in the opposite direction to our desired destination. We realised we were so fixated on getting to central station that we hopped on the first train with the word “central” (or “centraal” in Dutch) in the destination. It turns out we were headed to Den Haag Centraal, as opposed to Amsterdam Centraal, and these two stations are a fair bit apart. This was a startling thing to realise as we hurtled away from Schiphol airport in the wrong direction at around 100 miles per hour.
But what to do? What do you do when you realise you’re travelling in the wrong direction, drifting further and further away from your destination with each second that goes by? You could stay the course, get to the end of this new destination and then figure out how to get to where you were meant to be all along. Or you could get off the train at the next available opportunity, thereby cutting your losses and minimising your drift, thus making it easier to get to your destination. We opted for the latter. Thankfully, the next stop on the way to Den Haag Centraal, Leiden Centraal (what is it with stations and the word “central/centraal”?), was only a few minutes ahead of us. We got off there, and with the help of the station attendants, we figured out how to get back to Schiphol and then onwards to Amsterdam Centraal.
The idea for this blog post was born on our somewhat circuitous train journey. After we decided not to go all the way to Den Haag, it occurred to me that we’d made the right decision in the face of a cognitive bias known as the sunk-cost fallacy. When we found ourselves headed for Den Haag, we were already on a train away from the airport, and although we were uncertain of how to get to our desired destination in Amsterdam, there was a chance, however small, that we would still be able to arrive at Amsterdam if we went all the way to Den Haag. There was the temptation to do nothing in the moment, there was the allure of inaction. After all, we were on a train, moving away from the airport. But we made the snap decision to take action. Yes, we were on a train and were moving, but it was the wrong train, and it was taking us further away from where we wanted to be, where we needed to be. The act of getting off at the next stop was a tacit acknowledgement that we’d initially made the wrong decision, and we needed to fix it, to course correct. And that’s what we did. We made it to Amsterdam, had a blissful couple of days, and made it back home, and I’m pleased to report that there were no more train mishaps during the holiday or on the way back.
This is all to say that sometimes, in life and art, we may find ourselves on a path different to that which we want to be on. We can choose to stay the course, knowing it wouldn’t take us where we need to be. This is the tempting option, the course of inaction. This is because we’ve likely expended a lot of time, effort, energy, and resources on this course, so abandoning the course introduces severe cognitive dissonance. If you’ve put so much into something, it is difficult to walk away even when you realise it’s not working or it’s not the right thing for you. This may be a creative project, a career choice or a big life decision. How often do we find ourselves throwing good money after bad, putting in more hours and energy on an idea or project simply because the prospect of abandoning it seems too difficult? I know I’ve been there. The thing to remember is that this all comes at a cost, an opportunity cost. Time, energy, and money spent working on a failing project or idea is time, energy and money that can’t be put to better use elsewhere. Course correcting may be difficult, but it is the right thing to do, and it just might pay in the long run.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.