There was a packet trick I loved. I will not name the specific effect because the details do not matter and I do not want to disparage anyone’s creation. What matters is that I spent an enormous amount of time on it.
I first saw it in a tutorial and was immediately captivated. The method was elegant. The handling was challenging but achievable. The visual moment at the climax was, to my eyes, beautiful. I could already picture myself performing it at a dinner table, watching the spectator’s face change at the moment of revelation.
I practiced it for weeks. Alone in hotel rooms, at my desk at home, standing in front of a mirror. I refined the handling until it was smooth. I wrote a script. I rewrote the script. I practiced the script until it sounded natural. I worked out the angles. I rehearsed the reset. By the time I first performed it for a real audience, I had invested easily sixty to seventy hours in that single routine.
The reaction was polite. Not bad. Not confused or bored. Just… polite. The kind of mild appreciation you give when someone shows you something mildly interesting. “Oh, that’s cool.” Smile. Move on.
I told myself the audience was not right for that particular piece. I performed it again a few weeks later, at a different event. Same reaction. Polite interest. No gasp. No lingering wonder. No request to see it again.
Over the next several months, I performed it perhaps twenty times. The reaction was consistently the same: pleasant but unremarkable. Not once did it generate the kind of response that my better routines produced — the stunned silence, the burst of laughter, the “how did you do that” that you can hear across the room.
The evidence was clear. The routine was not working at the level I needed it to work. Not because of my execution — I had that down. But because the effect itself, whatever its technical merits, simply did not land with the visceral impact that entertainment demands.
I should have cut it after the fifth or sixth performance. Maybe sooner.
I kept it for almost a year.
Why I Could Not Let Go
The reason I kept a mediocre routine in my repertoire for nearly a year, despite overwhelming evidence that it was not generating strong reactions, has a clinical name: the sunk cost fallacy.
The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to continue investing in something because of the resources already invested, rather than making decisions based on future expected returns. You stay in a bad movie because you already paid for the ticket. You keep pouring money into a failing project because you have already spent so much. You eat the rest of the meal you did not enjoy because it cost thirty euros.
In every case, the past investment is irrelevant to the decision at hand. The money is spent whether you stay or leave. The time is gone whether you continue or cut your losses. The only rational question is: going forward, is this the best use of my resources?
But the sunk cost fallacy does not operate rationally. It operates emotionally. And the emotion it exploits is the pain of waste. The thought of all those hours — all that practice, all that scripting, all that refinement — being for nothing feels like a physical loss. It triggers the same loss aversion that makes us protect what we have. The invested time feels like something we possess, something that would be destroyed if we abandoned the project.
Except it would not be destroyed. It was already gone. The time was spent. The only question was whether I would continue spending more time on something that was not working, or redirect my energy to something that might.
For almost a year, I chose to keep spending.
The Consulting Parallel
In strategy consulting, the sunk cost fallacy is one of the most common and most destructive biases we encounter. It is the reason companies continue pouring resources into failing products, failing strategies, and failing divisions long after the evidence shows they should stop.
The conversations always sound the same. “We’ve already invested three million in this product line.” “We can’t shut down the project after two years of development.” “If we cut this division, all that work will have been wasted.”
My job in those conversations is to say what nobody wants to hear: the three million is gone. The two years are gone. The work is done and cannot be undone. The only question that matters is whether the next euro, the next hour, the next unit of attention should go to this project or to something else.
It is a brutally simple analysis. And it is brutally difficult to accept, because the sunk cost fallacy wraps the past investment in emotional armor that makes it feel present. It makes the spent money feel like money you still have. It makes the lost time feel like time you can still recover. It creates an illusion of ongoing value where no ongoing value exists.
I have sat in boardrooms and watched executives make decisions worth millions based on this illusion. And then I went back to my hotel room and practiced a routine that had been getting polite applause for six months, telling myself that with a little more work, it would start landing.
The physician, as always, was unable to heal himself.
The Repertoire Tax
There is a cost to keeping a mediocre routine in your set that goes beyond the wasted practice time. I think of it as the repertoire tax.
Every routine in your repertoire occupies a slot. Depending on your show length, you might have six, eight, ten, maybe twelve slots. Each slot represents an opportunity to create a powerful audience experience. A routine that generates polite applause is not neutral in that slot. It is actively costing you.
It costs you the opportunity to fill that slot with something better. Something that might generate the gasp, the laugh, the moment of genuine wonder that separates a good show from a great one.
It costs you momentum. A mediocre moment in the middle of a show does not just fail to add energy — it drains energy. It creates a valley that the next routine has to climb out of. Your strong pieces have to work harder because your weak piece is pulling the average down.
And it costs you creative bandwidth. Every hour you spend maintaining a routine that is not working is an hour you could spend developing its replacement. The sunk cost fallacy does not just prevent you from cutting the old routine. It prevents you from building the new one.
When I finally cut the packet trick from my set, the immediate effect was not that my show got shorter. The immediate effect was that I had practice time and mental space to develop a replacement. The replacement — a mentalism piece that I had been putting off for months because I was “too busy” maintaining my existing repertoire — turned out to be one of the strongest pieces in my current set.
Every month I had spent maintaining the weak routine was a month I could have spent developing the strong one. That is the repertoire tax. And I paid it for almost a year because I could not bring myself to write off the time I had already invested.
The Emotional Archaeology of a Bad Decision
Let me excavate the thought process that kept the weak routine alive, because understanding the mechanics of the bias is the first step to overcoming it.
Month one: “The audiences just haven’t been right for this piece. It needs a specific type of spectator.”
This is the attribution error. When a routine does not land, we look for external explanations rather than questioning the routine itself. The audience was wrong. The venue was not ideal. The timing was off. Each individual explanation is plausible. Collectively, they form a pattern of denial.
Month three: “I’ve been working on the handling. It’s getting smoother. Once the execution is perfect, the reactions will come.”
This is the refinement fallacy. The belief that better execution will fix a fundamentally weak effect. Sometimes it does. But if you have performed a routine twenty times with consistently mediocre reactions, the problem is almost certainly not execution. The execution is already good enough to test the effect’s strength. The effect is telling you something. You are not listening.
Month six: “I’ve invested so much in this routine. It would be a waste to cut it now.”
This is the sunk cost fallacy in its purest form. The investment is mentioned not as context but as justification. The past is being used to dictate the future. The time spent is being treated as a reason to spend more time, when it is in fact no reason at all.
Month nine: “I know this routine isn’t my strongest, but it’s reliable. I can count on it not to bomb.”
This is the reframing stage. The routine has been demoted from “strong piece that needs the right audience” to “reliable filler that won’t cause problems.” This is the moment you should hear alarm bells. If the best thing you can say about a routine is that it will not actively harm your show, it does not belong in your show.
Month eleven: “Fine. It’s out.”
This is the moment of cutting. And the feeling that accompanies it is not relief. It is grief. Genuine, recognizable grief for the lost investment, for the hours that will not come back, for the version of the routine that existed in your imagination but never materialized on stage.
That grief is real, and it deserves to be acknowledged. But it is grief for something that is already gone. The time was spent the moment it was spent. Cutting the routine does not create the loss. The loss happened in real time, hour by hour, over months of investing in something that was not returning the investment.
How I Screen for Sunk Costs Now
After the packet trick experience, I built a system for evaluating my repertoire that is specifically designed to counteract the sunk cost fallacy. It is not complicated, but it requires discipline.
Every three months, I review each routine in my repertoire and ask a single question: If I had not already invested time in learning this routine — if I were seeing it fresh today for the first time — would I choose to add it to my set?
This question strips away the sunk cost. It forces an evaluation based entirely on the routine’s current and future value, ignoring the past investment entirely. It is the consulting question transplanted to my practice: regardless of what has already been spent, is this the best use of the slot going forward?
If the answer is no — if I would not choose this routine fresh — then the routine is a candidate for cutting. Not an automatic cut. There might be reasons to keep it: maybe it serves a specific structural function in the show, maybe it is uniquely suited to a particular type of audience. But the burden of proof shifts. The default is cut. The routine has to justify its continued existence on its merits, not on the basis of time already invested.
This system has led me to cut three routines in the past year that I would otherwise have kept indefinitely. In each case, the cutting felt painful. In each case, the replacement that eventually filled the slot was stronger than what it replaced.
The Broader Principle
The sunk cost fallacy does not limit itself to repertoire decisions. It shows up throughout a performer’s life.
In practice methodology: you have been practicing a certain way for years. Changing your approach would mean admitting that all those years of practice were suboptimally structured. The sunk cost of the old method makes the new method feel like an accusation.
In creative identity: you have defined yourself as a certain type of performer. Changing your creative direction would mean the years you spent building the old identity were, if not wasted, then less relevant than they might have been. The sunk cost of the old identity resists the pull of the new one.
In professional relationships: you have been working with a particular collaborator, mentor, or organization for a long time. The relationship is no longer serving your development, but ending it would mean that all the time invested in building it was somehow diminished. The sunk cost of the relationship keeps you in a dynamic that has run its course.
In every case, the solution is the same uncomfortable truth: the past is past. The time is spent. The money is gone. The hours are consumed. None of it comes back, regardless of what you decide to do next. The only relevant question is what to do with the resources you still have — the next hour, the next session, the next show.
Every minute you spend maintaining something that is not working is a minute you are choosing not to spend on something that might. The sunk cost fallacy makes that choice feel like loyalty, like discipline, like respect for the work. It is none of those things.
It is waste, dressed up as virtue. And the only way to stop it is to look at your repertoire, your practice, and your creative choices with the cold, clear eyes of someone who just walked in and has no history to protect.
What would that person keep?
That is what you should keep.
Everything else, no matter how much it cost you, should go.