A Step Backwards After a Wrong Turn

"I know it isn’t working. But we have already put so much into it.” A client said this to me recently while we were discussing a decision that had gone wrong. A substantial amount of money had already been committed, but the larger investment was the time, energy and attention spent trying to make it work.

He knew that, with what he knows today, he would not make the same choice again. Yet stepping away felt like admitting that all of it had been wasted. I suggested something that felt counterintuitive: perhaps we should pause and take a step backwards.

We at KompassIQ.com often face similar questions and, more importantly, similar behaviour. We give too much weight to what we have already invested. The money is spent. The time has passed. Yet we continue because stopping makes the earlier decision feel like a mistake. This is what economists call sunk cost.

A sunk cost is a cost that cannot be recovered. Putting more money, time or effort into the same decision does not bring it back. The more useful question is: “Knowing what I know today, would I make the same decision again?” If the answer is no, the past should not be allowed to decide the future. There is another cost we often overlook: opportunity cost. Every rupee, hour and unit of attention committed to one path is unavailable for another. Continuing with a failing decision does not merely preserve the original loss; it also prevents us from pursuing better alternatives.

I think of it like a trek. Imagine walking for hours and arriving close to the summit, only for the weather to change. Visibility disappears and the trail ahead becomes dangerous. Turning back feels almost impossible because you have already come so far. But the mountain does not care how far you have walked. Being closer to the summit does not make the weather safer. Sometimes the wisest trekker is the one who turns around.

We see this in investing, business and careers. We hold on to an investment because selling makes the loss real. We keep putting money into a business because walking away makes the original decision look wrong. We stay with a plan because changing course feels like failure. But there is a difference between being wrong and staying wrong. The first is unavoidable. The second is a choice.

Changing course is not the same as abandoning progress. It is a way of redirecting the time, money and attention that remain. Once we accept that the past cannot be recovered, the next decision becomes clearer: what is the best use of our resources now?

That is where productive course correction begins. We do not need to solve everything at once or retrace the entire route. We need to identify the next sound step: one conversation, one revised plan, one small experiment or one decision to stop investing further. The destination may still matter, but progress comes from choosing the next move based on current reality rather than past commitment.

Most of us could retract from that point. Very few of us choose to. And that ability to step back, reassess and take the next right step can become an unfair advantage.