You’ll find you’ve paid for it and don’t have it

“If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it” – Henry Ford

The timing of coming across this quote (on David Heinemeier Hansson’s blog) couldn’t have been better as we emerged from a rejig of our web properties. It also led me down the rabbit hole to the Harvard Business School’s research piece by Clayton M. Christensen (and his book How will you measure your life) on the long-term impact of marginal cost thinking. It’s something I’ve been running into a fair bit this year incidentally.

Trying to change how we’re going about some of the decisions we’re making takes a lot of stopping yourself from doing the default thing—whether it’s letting a sunk cost prevent us from doing more, how we might use a subscription service to the very simple ‘should I fill up my whole fuel tank now vs later’.