The old stuff isn’t good because it’s old.
I talked about the sunk cost fallacy and how it can really screw up our business decisions as entertainers. While it’s great to re-evaluate trash or treasure, not everything goes in the bin.
We often think sunk costs are assets
We get hung up on sunk costs because we think they’re assets. Assets when we’re talking about branding and building a business are things that help us serve our audience that are hard for our competitors to acquire.
An example of hard to aquire… 5 years of apprenticeship under the best writers in the world would take anyone else 5 years and they would also have to seek out the best writers in the world and get approval to apprentice under them.
If you’re trying to decide the difference between an asset and sunk cost, though, the thing to focus on is “things that help us serve our audience.” If our audience is illiterate, and they don’t need someone to write on their behalf, that 5 years may be a sunk cost. We can let it go and find / build our other assets.
Building assets gives us distance from our competition
Your assets might be…
- Patents
- Experience
- Knowledge
- Network
- Audience size
- Copyrights
- Money
- Property
- Benefactors
- Physical fitness
- And so forth
Our goal is to be so far from competition and so close to our audience that we are in a category of one. So, as we better understand the needs of our audience, we can bolster our assets (get a 6th year apprenticing with writers) or we can add new assets (write a book).
The more assets we build, the harder it is for anyone to catch up (think Amazon).
If you have a patent on something, like a magician’s prop, nobody else can make that prop. It’s proprietary which is very valuable. But, in the same way if you have a magic trick that has no legal protection, but would take anyone else $4,000,000 to perform, you’ve also got a form of asset protection.
The zombie asset
Letting go of our sunk costs can be scary, so maybe find some comfort in the fact that assets can come back from the dead. As your audience changes or as the way you serve them changes, the things you thought were sunk costs, might come back from the dead and become assets again.
The trick is to use this narrative to let things go, not to hoard.
I know this is a quick article and assets in the entertainment business can be ambiguous AF. Please lemme know if you have questions.