Erase

There are times when a good memory is distinctly unhelpful. An example is my vacation to Antarctica in 2008, which now seems like a lifetime ago.

One year in advance I had chartered a ship and invited family and friends to join me. A few months before we left for the trip, the worldwide investment firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. What followed was either “The Great Recession” if you kept your job and home, or “The Second Great Depression” if you lost your job or your home. My business promptly began to lose large amounts of money instead of doing what I think it always should do – operate at a profit.

But I had made a large nonrefundable deposit on the charter, and decided to make the trip despite the additional smaller cost, over and above my deposit.

That two-week trip was one of the best vacations of my life.

Part of the reason I enjoyed it so much was that I erased the cost from my mind. Of course, it’s like erasing a file on your computer – the file isn’t really gone, just the pointers to it. So though I remembered the dollars from time to time, my memory was eased by the theory of sunk cost which says that money already spent is gone forever.  For this reason I find it useful to focus on today and on the future, rather than the past.

We each make decisions all of the time, if only when to get out of bed in the morning or what to eat for breakfast. Virtually every alternative (stay in bed vs. get up; plain yogurt vs. a croissant) has plusses and minuses. If I stay in bed all day I will have more work to catch up with tomorrow. A buttered croissant might taste better than a yogurt, but it comes with many more calories. There is no act that any of us can take in life without both sacrificing the alternatives and incurring some cost (if only the cost of our time).

We all have to make decisions, but after I make a decision I choose to focus not on its price, but on its reward. This is how I maximize the enjoyment of my life.

I’m sure you can immediately think of examples in your own life where Erase will be helpful, such as forgetting a few sunk costs (financial or emotional) which are unpleasant to remember.

I suggest you use the People Tool of Erase to add to your enjoyment of every moment, every single day.

Alan