One of my best friends from my college days is a man named Saeed. We studied Mechanical Engineering together at UW, and were forged together as brothers in the heat of the inferno, also known as Professor Emery's thermodynamics lecture. Professor Emery started teaching at the university some 50 years before I was a student there, before the invention of "syllabus day." He started writing on the chalkboard when the bell rang on the first day, and if you weren't ready with pen in hand, you were already behind for the quarter. Saeed and I are still tight to this day, despite living very different lives in different states now.
Saeed called me one day back when we were fresh faced mechanical engineers to see if I could come with him on a long drive into the middle of nowhere rural Washington to look at a Toyota truck that was for sale. I said of course, that's what you do for your friends.
Two hours later, we got to the end of a dirt road with a double wide on it. The lot and location was actually incredibly beautiful, I was jealous. But the truck, well, it was a different story. It had 4 wheels and the glass was intact, but that was about the end of the positives. It had multiple oil leaks, the paint looked way rougher than in the pictures, the exhaust was rusted, the drive shaft looked dubious, and those are just the things I remember ten years later.
Saeed was hemming and hawing trying to find a way to convince himself this was still the truck he wanted, but he was having a hard time of it. I was encouraging him to walk away but he said "we drove all this way, it'd be such a waste." So I finally said to him "Saeed, it's better to drive a long way and not buy a bad truck, than it is to drive a long way AND buy a bad truck."
We got back in his car and turned around. The seller called us on our way out to try to entice us back with a lower price, but Saeed stayed firm. And good thing he did, he found the perfect truck, albeit years later, and he hasn't looked back.
Where in your life are you buying the bad truck that you drove a long way for, instead of turning around? Where are you convincing yourself to stick with something that doesn't work for you just because you've been doing it so long?
Maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's a job, maybe it's an employee, maybe it's a business you contracted with to complete a project for you. Are you ready to cut the bad trucks from your life? What amazing things could happen if you were brave enough not to buy the bad truck anymore?