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The Red Thread This Week:
“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.” — Russian Proverb
When my boys were four and two, we adopted a Russian Tortoise from neighborhood friends.
They gave us everything. The aquarium, the food, the heat lamp. All free.
His name was Speedy.
And my boys were fired up. The lettuce feeding. Putting him in the grass in the backyard. The "treats" like strawberries and hibiscus flowers.
What we didn't know was that Russian Tortoises live 40 to 50 years.
Some make it to 100! 😳
We had adopted a pet that could outlive us.
But there ya go…and for years Speedy was great and we loved him. We’d joke about how happy our kids would be to have Speedy in their wedding photos someday.
But as the kids got older, things changed. The feeding and upkeep shifted from their favorite activity to something my wife and I handled by default.
(We also adopted two wonderful dogs along the way, and they completely diverted the flow of pet-love in our home.)
Speedy was healthy. He was fine. But he'd become part of the house the way furniture becomes part of the house.
You sort of stop seeing it. You just maintain it.
Then about two months ago, a young guy at my daughter's work mentioned he was looking for a tortoise. A door opened that we probably should have walked through years earlier.
We gave Speedy a new home.
Everyone was fine. Including Speedy.
But it highlighted for me the power of sunk costs; of maintaining all the artifacts of a decision made years ago, that was no longer serving us.
We held on to Speedy because he was here, and that's what we'd always done.
So the Red Thread this week is about sunk costs, and why the decisions you’ve already made about your business, or your work, or your art shouldn’t always get a vote in what you do next.
~ Jaime
🔑 The Unlock
Why You Might Struggle with Sunk Costs Inside your Business
The rational logic isn’t hard to wrap your head around. Anything you spent yesterday, time, money, energy, etc., is gone. You don’t get it back.
You just have new outcomes to evaluate today, in order to make new decisions.
But we’re not rational, logical creatures.
We struggle to see these new outcomes for what they really are because the fact that we “spent” in the first place solidifies our belief that the outcomes have value.
But those outcomes are just gifts from your past self to your present self.
And you don’t have to accept them if you don’t want to.
1️⃣ The Format You Can't Quit
Nearly every content team I work with has at least one format they're keeping alive purely out of routine, because the effort had become automatic.
The YouTube channel that takes 8 hours a week and has never generated a client call.
The social media account that fills the calendar but doesn't move anyone closer to becoming a customer.
If this format disappeared tomorrow, would your business (not your ego) feel it?
If the answer is "probably not," you’ve identified an opportunity.
For operators: Every format in your media stack should justify its existence in one sentence tied to a business outcome: “The job of this [content type] is to [business purpose].
"The job of this podcast is to reinforce trust with existing clients."
"The job of this Instagram account is to introduce us to new audiences."
If a format can't do that, it's running on inertia-only, and that’s a terrible strategy.
2️⃣ The Story You're Telling Yourself
It’s incredibly hard to ignore sunk costs in our work, (or life for that matter — I got this law degree, I took this how-to course, I started this book club) because they impact us emotionally, and they have layers.
The first layer is identity.
You told people you were launching a podcast. You bought the mic. You told your LinkedIn network.
Walking away feels like admitting you were wrong.
The second layer is narrative.
You've built a story about what this new project represents: your commitment, your ability to be consistent, or creative.
Quitting threatens that story.
The third layer is tribal.
What will the other people think? What will they say about me?
All 3 of these are real and none of them are strategic.
Your audience does not care about this story layer. They care about whether what you publish is worth their time.
For operators: You add formats but never subtract them. The stack grows. Every format demands maintenance.
And because you feel responsible for the investment, you keep everything running at 60% instead of running fewer things at 100%.
3️⃣ Cruft
In software engineering, there's a word for the accumulated junk that builds up in a system over time: cruft.
It still technically functions and maybe doesn't break anything obvious. But it slows everything down and gets in the way every time you try to build something new.
Your content operation accumulates cruft the same way.
The welcome email sequence that no longer reflects your voice.
The social templates from a different era of your business.
The newsletter format that made sense three versions of your business ago.
None of it is broken. All of it is drag.
For operators: Cruft shows up as a vague heaviness. The feeling that content is a grind, that you're working harder than the results justify.
Sometimes the highest-leverage move available to you is subtraction. What's left gets cleaner, faster, and easier to build on.
💡 Mindset Shift
We didn't give Speedy away because he was a bad pet, (he was a great tortoise!) we gave him away because our family changed around him.
The boys grew up. The dogs arrived. Our life looked different than it did when a little Russian Tortoise in an aquarium was exactly the right fit.
The part that sticks with me is that we probably should have made the move years earlier. But turns out we actually needed someone to say, "Hey, I'm looking for a tortoise." We needed the door to appear before we could walk through it.
You don't have to wait for that door.
You can walk through your content stack this week and ask each format: Knowing what I know now, would I start this today?
If the answer is no, that format is a gift from your past self. You can choose to keep the gift if you’d like.
Or you can appreciate what it was, find it a good home, and move forward.
🎲 Prompt Playground
The Sunk Cost Audit
Use this to identify which parts of your content operation you're maintaining based on real strategic value vs. routine.
Prompt:
You are a media strategy consultant helping me identify sunk cost traps in my content operation.
My Current Setup:
My business: [describe what you do and who you serve]
Everything I currently publish: [list each format, platform, and cadence]
How long I've been doing each: [approximate for each]
Which ones I'd start again if I were starting fresh today: [be honest]
Which ones I suspect I'm keeping alive out of routine: [be honest here too]
Help me evaluate:
For each format I flagged as "routine," help me articulate what I'm actually afraid of losing if I stop. Is it business impact, or identity and social pressure?
What is the real opportunity cost? What could that time and energy go toward?
If I could only keep two formats, which two would create the most business value and why?
For anything I should cut, how do I wind it down without damaging audience trust?
Give me a one-sentence "keep or cut" recommendation for each format.
Be direct. No hype. Tell me what I need to hear.
Ask me clarifying questions in order to conduct this audit as effectively as possible.
Need Help With This?
I work with operators who know something in their content stack needs to change but struggle with:
Building systems to simplify content creation/publishing
Identifying which formats add value, and which don’t
Creating engines to repurpose their content, so 1+1=3
If this sounds like you, hit reply and say hi.
We can trade a few emails; no cost or strings.
Just here to help you move forward.
~ Jaime
⚡ Before You Go
Here are a few other ways I can help:
🗓️ 1:1 brainstorming call: A quick, free call to help you get unstuck
🎙️ Podcast support: Get pro-level guidance without hiring full-time.
🚀 Speaking & workshops: Hit reply and write “Speak” - let’s talk!
📓 The 7-Day Podcast Playbook: Go from zero to podcast in 7 days (free)
🤖 AI Prompt Library: 12 prompts to use AI as a strategic thinking partner (free)
And I’d really appreciate your help:
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Prefer Audio?
Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here :)
~ Jaime