There’s an old saying. “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.
Personally, I find it a little dramatic. But if sayings and stereotypes weren’t true at least 60% of the time, they probably wouldn’t exist.
In this post I want to talk about sunk-cost fallacy, pivoting tactically, and how deviating from your plan can save your career.
When I was 2 years into a 4-year degree at Brigham Young University – Hawaii, I was studying international communications with a minor in Japanese. My university’s employment office was well-connected to the hospitality and hotel management industry, and in 2009-2010 in the heart of the housing crisis, I thought the best option would be to finish my degree and stay in Hawaii, which always had a steady stream of Japanese tourists.
I figured I would work for a travel agency or a resort as a service representative and work my way up.
There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with this plan. The biggest flaw was one that most college-aged students’ plans include: A lack of steps and flexibility, not to mention the catch-all cop-out, “work my way up”.
What ended up happening was that in late 2010, several slots at Narita Airport opened up for inbound flights from Honolulu. This led to a couple of hiring campaigns for Japanese speaking flight attendants.
As a little bit of context, it is common for newly hired flight attendants in the US to fly short-stop domestic routes with 8-hour layovers FOR YEARS before building up enough seniority to hold the lucrative long-haul international flights with long layovers.
The only way to circumvent this was to be hired as a “Language of Destination” flight attendant at a time when there was demand. Then you could be assigned international flying immediately, as only language-qualified flight attendants could bid for the language-specific slots. For Japanese, this was a once-every-10-years opportunity that came to me when I was 24, and it was roughly aligned to my career plan, except better. It ended up being a fairly easy decision, but it did mean dropping out of college.
College had always been in the plan. I grew up considering it a given that I would at least get a bachelor’s degree, as it was basically a prerequisite for whatever I wanted to do.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that assumption, but it was time for the first pivot of my career.
It could’ve been easy to be trapped by the “sunk-cost fallacy”. This is the erroneous belief that a course of action should be continued to the end due to the amount of time and money that have already been invested in them, even when there are better options on the table. If I had stayed in college, I would’ve missed my opportunity to do something interesting and exclusive, and probably would be wearing a Hawaiian shirt in a hotel lobby checking in guests today (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Instead, there have been a lot of tactical pivots throughout my career, that have brought me experiences that I couldn’t have imagined, let alone planned for 12 years ago.
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is a fine saying, but it’s passive and vague. I prefer a mantra. Something with a little more proactivity and flair. Now I live by “Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready”. I keep my body in shape, my mind curious and open, and my network close. This means having the flexibility to take a new opportunity when one arises, and pivot on the fly.
Pivoting of course, is not the only thing one should focus on. But it would be a shame to let obstacles like the sunk-cost fallacy, or unpreparedness and insecurity prevent you from jumping at the perfect pivot that comes along.
Jarom Reid 