I'm on this track now... I'll stay here

International women's day and I'm in Adelaide, Australia.

A morning event at the exhibition centre has just finished and hundreds of women head in all directions across the city.

Many of us wait for taxis to take us to our next stop for the morning. My stop was only a few kms away but with a suitcase suffering wheel alignment problems, I've left plenty of 'rubber on the road' simply walking to the rank.

Plenty waiting at the cab rank but no cabs. It happens sometimes. Some of us called cab companies saying there were 10, 20, 30 fares waiting.

Still not a vacant cab came by over the next 20minutes. We were all looking down the road from where the traffic was approaching.

Then I see across the road, up the hill, north a few hundred metres, a cab rank with 8 taxis waiting for fares. What?!

Though I'm in prime position at the front of the queue, I drop my "sunk costs" of waiting and head up the street - with my suitcase wheel leaving burn-out marks on the path as I go.

I hop into the first cab. Yeah! We're off! I chat with the cab driver about the busy morning, the traffic and other small talk.

He says he'd seen me waiting down the hill in the queue (in my bright coloured dress) for most of those 20 minutes. He'd been inching his way through a queue waiting for a fare at a hotel cab rank.

Why couldn't he have dropped his sunk costs of waiting in the rank and headed over to where plenty of other customers were?

Making a u-turn at that part of the city to get from his rank to the other rank was too hard, too difficult - 'a nightmare' he said.

Given the direction I was heading, we ended up having to do that u-turn anyway! Oh no!

In my mind, the turn wasn't a 'nightmare' at all. Waiting for the cab was the 'nightmare'. Running late for the appointment was a 'nightmare'.

I laughed it up with the driver that we could have both been on our way and be done - me to my meeting and him to his next job - if we had dropped our sunk costs earlier and gone to where the opportunities really were.

What stuff is your team, project or business hanging on to that could be jettisoned for a fresh start? Ouch! Yep, let it go, fail it fast and move on to an opportunity that will reward you with sweet dreams rather than perceived 'nightmares'. You'll never know until you cross the road!