What Living With No Sunk Costs Really Looks Like (Zweig’s Kahneman Story)

Jason Zweig wrote a beautiful memorial post for his friend and co-collaborator Daniel Kahneman this week. But, honestly, every time I think about Kahneman and imagine what it would have been like to work with him, I think of this article from Zweig (from years ago).

It’s about not getting caught up on anything from the past. It’s about being present. It’s about the intensity of getting incredible things DONE. 

And he explains better than I ever can, so just read (emphasis added):

But nothing amazed me more about Danny than his ability to detonate what we had just done.

Anyone who has ever collaborated with him tells a version of this story: You go to sleep feeling that Danny and you had done important and incontestably good work that day.  You wake up at a normal human hour, grab breakfast, and open your email.  To your consternation, you see a string of emails from Danny, beginning around 2:30 a.m.  The subject lines commence in worry (something like “I don’t think this works”), turn darker (“What were we thinking?”), and end around 5 a.m. in a barrage of panic (“This will not do at all”) and despair (“This is just garbage”).*

You send an email asking when he can talk; you assume Danny must be asleep after staying up all night trashing the chapter.  Your cellphone rings a few seconds later. “I think I figured out the problem,” says Danny, sounding remarkably chipper.  “What do you think of this approach instead?”

The next thing you know, he sends a version so utterly transformed that it is unrecognizable: It begins differently, it ends differently, it incorporates anecdotes and evidence you never would have thought of, it draws on research that you’ve never heard of. If the earlier version was close to gold, this one is hewn out of something like diamond: The raw materials have all changed, but the same ideas are somehow illuminated with a sharper shift of brilliance.

The first time this happened, I was thunderstruck.  How did he do that? How could anybody do that?  When I asked Danny how he could start again as if we had never written an earlier draft, he said the words I’ve never forgotten: “I have no sunk costs.”

Nobody like him.

RIP Daniel Kahneman.