I suspect every single one of you who is reading this has heard someone use the phrase about not throwing good money after bad. It's one of those pieces of practical wisdom that makes immediate sense the moment you hear it. At some point the cost of continuing to invest in something that isn't working exceeds whatever you might recover from it, and the smart move is to stop.
I've been wondering lately what it would look like if we applied that same philosophy to time.
This past Saturday was a classic Midwestern fall day and I surrendered into it completely. Emma and I went to visit my mom and then continued on to an amazing, and somehow free, outdoor event called Pumpkin Palooza in Aurora, Illinois. Emma painted pumpkins, petted snakes, played with a giant Jenga board, launched small pumpkins out of a slingshot, and got her face painted. It was an unhurried, unscheduled kind of day and I gave myself over to it fully with no clock watching, no mental task list running in the background, and no concern about what time we got back to the city. I missed watching my Michigan Wolverines on television, but I caught the end of the game on the drive home. As it turned out, if I had spent the whole day watching the game I think I would have felt like I threw all of my time on a stunning Saturday into something that didn’t end the way I wanted it to, so apparently I didn’t miss much
Sunday morning arrived with a different energy. I woke up thinking about everything I wanted to get done before the new week began on Monday and I spent the first couple of hours actually making progress, which gave me the satisfaction of feeling like I was getting ahead of the game, which is an energy that I tend to live in almost all the time. By late morning though, things took an interesting turn.
Sunday was another perfect fall day and somewhere around eleven in the morning I couldn't get the idea of making a pot roast out of my mind. Pot roast, and fall football Sundays are a match made in heaven for me. My go-to cut is an eye of the round roast because it’s lean, reliable, and the same way my mom always made it. I told my wife I was going to zip over to the Jewel, which for those of you outside of Chicago requires clarification: it is always THE Jewel, never just Jewel. Those of us who live here have more colloquialisms than just Da Bears.
What followed was one of the more instructive two hours of my recent life, and not for the reasons I expected.
The Jewel had no eye of round roast. I asked the man behind the butcher counter why, and he offered no additional information. I thought about my options for a few minutes. I thought about coming up with a different meal plan. In the end I drove to Whole Foods, almost certain that I would find something there. It was definitely going to add to my travel time and make me miss the noon kickoffs, but I had a taste for pot roast, another Chicago colloquialism, so off to Whole Foods I drove.
Much to my dismay, once again I got the same outcome: no eye of the round roast, no additional information. I stood in the Whole Foods parking lot at what I now recognize as a genuine inflection point. It was the moment where a reasonable person makes a meatloaf instead, but I’m not always entirely reasonable so I got back in my car and drove to Mariano's, which has an extensive butcher operation including a kosher counter that often carries cuts other stores don't. Unfortunately, I neglected to remember that it was Sunday and the kosher counter was closed. The prepackaged shelves offered an average-looking chuck roast that I was not interested in after an hour and fifteen minutes of searching.
Here is another interesting tidbit. When I first got the idea for pot roast that morning, I remembered that I had found an excellent eye of the round at Costco the previous year. I dismissed that option immediately because Costco is twenty minutes away and would be a zoo on a Sunday, so instead, I spent an hour and fifteen minutes driving to three closer stores, each of which failed me, before finally getting in my car at twelve thirty and driving to Costco, where I found a two pack of eye of the round roasts at the shockingly low price of $5.99 a pound, which is actually cheaper than ground beef and was almost certainly my best first option all along.
I got home at 1:30 PM after two hours of grocery shopping across four stores. I missed the first half of the Lions game, which almost had the same outcome as the Michigan game the day before, but the most important thing is that pot roast was magnificent.
Through the years I've faced many situations where I had to decide whether to stay the course or let something go — not just with jobs or relationships, but with the smaller daily negotiations between what I want and what I'm willing to invest to get it. What I've noticed about myself, and what I suspect resonates with a lot of men, is a tendency to stay fixated on a specific outcome well past the point where that fixation is actually serving me. There is something in the masculine wiring, or at least in mine, that can mistake stubbornness for persistence and call it a virtue.
One of my mentors puts it this way: default to persistence, but quit when persistence is no longer buying you progress or new learning.
Somewhere in the back of my mind throughout that Sunday morning odyssey, I was checking in with that idea. I was weighing the value of the meal I wanted against the time I was investing to make it happen, knowing full well that I still had plenty to do at home. As I texted my wife updates from various parking lots, there were parts of me that felt the distinct sensation of throwing good time after bad, but here's what actually happened.
I finished the day with time for everything. Time with Emma. Time to cook the dinner. Time for a thirty minute walk during her Nutcracker rehearsal. Even time to watch the end of the football game, which my Lions probably didn't deserve to win but won anyway.
Somewhere between Mariano's and Costco I stopped believing that I had to choose between the pot roast and the rest of my day, and I just accepted that if I surrendered into the best of multiple possible outcomes, the way I had at Pumpkin Palooza the day before, I would probably wind up having another really good day.
The difference between Saturday and Sunday wasn't the schedule or the circumstances. It was the grip. On Saturday I held the day loosely and it gave me everything. On Sunday I held one outcome tightly for two hours before I finally loosened my grip, and the day still gave me everything, just on a slightly delayed timeline and with considerably more miles on the car.
Persistence matters and knowing the value of your time matters. Not quitting on the things that are actually important is one of the most essential qualities a man can develop. Now, if I had only leaned into my more intuitive side, which is generally associated as being in alignment with my feminine, I might’ve just gone to Costco first and saved all kinds of time, but then I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to have so much fun writing this story.
Wishing you all a wonderful week ahead and I hope to see you in a meeting soon!