The Hidden Cost of Leaving Something That Was Working
Why success can sometimes tempt us to interrupt the very process that created it
In 2019, SoftBank sold its stake in Nvidia.
By almost any normal measure, the investment had been a tremendous success. SoftBank had invested roughly $700 million and reportedly exited for about $3.3 billion. Nobody had to explain away a loss. Nobody had to defend a failed decision. They had taken hundreds of millions of dollars and turned them into billions.
Then Nvidia kept going.
As artificial intelligence transformed the technology landscape, Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world. The stake SoftBank had sold eventually would have been worth vastly more had it remained intact. Years later, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son could joke about having sold the shares too early, even sharing a memorable moment onstage with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang over the decision.
It makes a wonderful investing story, but I think there is a much bigger lesson hiding inside it.
Sometimes the expensive decision isn’t choosing the wrong thing.
It’s leaving the right thing too soon.
We Spend a Lot of Time Learning How to Start
Most personal-development advice is understandably focused on beginnings. How do you start exercising? How do you lose the first ten pounds? How do you build a business? How do you develop a new habit? How do you overcome procrastination and finally begin?
These are important questions because starting is difficult.
But there is another problem that receives far less attention: what happens when the thing you started actually begins to work?
Strangely enough, success creates risks of its own.
You lose the weight, so the habits that helped you lose it no longer seem quite as important. You build some strength, so missing workouts doesn’t feel consequential. Your business begins producing steady customers, so you stop doing some of the small things that originally earned those customers. You establish a productive morning routine, experience the benefits, and then start experimenting with something new because the routine that works has become boring.
Nothing appears to be going wrong.
That’s what makes this stage dangerous.
Failure usually announces itself. Success can quietly convince us that the process responsible for it is no longer necessary.
Don’t Confuse the Result With the Process
When something works, we naturally focus on what it produced.
The weight loss. The savings account. The stronger body. The finished manuscript. The profitable business. The improved relationship. The new skill.
But those outcomes are snapshots. Behind each one is a process that operated long enough to produce it.
This is where we can make a subtle mistake. We begin treating the result as something we now possess rather than something our behavior continues to support.
A healthy body is not simply something you acquire. A strong relationship isn’t something you finish building. Financial security isn’t a box you check. Expertise doesn’t remain sharp without use. A successful business doesn’t continue growing because last year’s decisions were good.
The visible result may belong to today, but much of what created it happened yesterday.
And what happens tomorrow will depend heavily on what you continue doing today.
That is why Momentum Mastery places so much emphasis on continuity. The objective isn’t simply to produce a result. It is to develop a way of operating that makes desirable results increasingly likely.
Success Can Interrupt Compounding
Compounding is easy to understand when we talk about money because we can watch numbers grow on a spreadsheet. But compounding is happening throughout our lives.
Every workout doesn’t merely burn calories. It contributes to capacity.
Every page you write doesn’t merely add another page. It strengthens your ability to think and communicate.
Every promise you keep to yourself doesn’t simply complete a task. It contributes another piece of evidence to your identity.
Every difficult conversation handled well adds experience to the next one.
Every morning you show up and practice your craft makes tomorrow’s work slightly less foreign.
Individual actions may seem almost insignificant. Their accumulated effects are not.
The trouble is that compounding often becomes most powerful after the process has become ordinary. By then, the excitement of starting has disappeared. Progress may no longer feel dramatic. The behavior simply becomes part of life.
And that is precisely when we may be tempted to leave it.
We mistake boredom for stagnation. We mistake familiarity for ineffectiveness. We mistake the absence of dramatic progress for the absence of progress altogether.
So we change the program. Abandon the routine. Chase something new. Cash out the habit.
Not because it stopped working.
Because we stopped noticing that it was working.
Conviction → Continuity → Compounding
There is a simple progression underneath many of the things that create meaningful change.
Conviction → Continuity → Compounding.
Conviction allows you to choose a direction and begin.
Continuity keeps you moving in that direction long enough for your actions to accumulate.
Compounding is what eventually turns those repeated actions into something much larger than the individual actions themselves.
Most people understandably want the third part. They want the transformation, the capability, the financial security, the confidence, the health, the mastery.
But you cannot continually interrupt the second stage and expect to receive the full benefit of the third.
This is one reason the start-stop cycle can be so costly. Every restart may feel like another attempt at improvement, but repeatedly abandoning something that was already working can prevent you from ever discovering what that process might have produced after five years instead of five months.
You keep planting new trees just as the old ones begin developing roots.
This Doesn’t Mean You Never Change Course
There is an obvious danger in taking this idea too far.
Persistence isn’t automatically a virtue. Sometimes a business model really has stopped working. Sometimes an exercise program needs to change. Sometimes a relationship has become destructive. Sometimes new information invalidates an old decision. Sometimes the intelligent thing to do is leave.
Momentum Mastery isn’t about stubbornly continuing because you once made a decision.
It is about learning to distinguish between evidence that something is no longer working and discomfort with continuing something that is.
Those are very different signals.
This is where a principle we’ve discussed before becomes useful:
Trust the Trend, But Watch the Wobble.
Pay attention. Remain open-minded. Adjust when the evidence changes. But don’t become perpetually undecided simply because another possibility has appeared.
A new option isn’t automatically a better option.
Novelty isn’t evidence.
Boredom isn’t evidence.
A difficult week isn’t evidence.
And temporary discomfort certainly isn’t evidence that the underlying direction is wrong.
The question isn’t, Could I be doing something different?
You almost always could.
A better question is, Has something materially changed that gives me a good reason to abandon what is already working?
Protect What Is Working
There is another question worth asking whenever we consider changing course:
What am I interrupting?
That question forces us to look beyond the immediate decision.
If you stop walking every morning, you aren’t simply reclaiming thirty minutes. You may be interrupting cardiovascular conditioning, mobility, mood regulation, a morning ritual, and an identity built around being someone who moves every day.
If you abandon a writing routine because progress seems slow, you aren’t simply skipping today’s thousand words. You may be interrupting a creative process that becomes more valuable the longer you practice it.
If you abandon a sound financial strategy because another investment suddenly looks exciting, you aren’t merely changing assets. You may be interrupting years of disciplined compounding.
We naturally calculate what a new decision might give us.
We are much worse at calculating what the decision might quietly stop.
That is the hidden cost.
Don’t Cash Out Your Progress Too Early
Masayoshi Son’s Nvidia story is memorable because the numbers are enormous. A multibillion-dollar success can look remarkably different when viewed against what might have happened next.
Our own decisions usually involve much smaller numbers, but the principle may be just as important.
A good life is built from processes that are allowed to keep working.
There will always be another strategy, another diet, another productivity system, another investment idea, another business opportunity, another morning routine, another piece of advice telling us that perhaps we should be doing everything differently.
Some of those ideas will deserve our attention.
Most don’t require us to abandon what is already working.
Before leaving something that has been producing good results, stop long enough to ask:
Has the underlying evidence changed?
Or have I simply become accustomed to the success it has created?
Because sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t finding the next great thing.
It is staying with a good thing long enough to discover what it can become.
Protect the compounding.
Momentum Mastery Reflection
Look at one area of your life that is currently working reasonably well—your health, writing, business, finances, relationships, learning, or daily routine.
Instead of asking what you should change next, ask:
What am I already doing that deserves more time to compound?
Then protect it.
You don’t always need another beginning.
Sometimes you need to stop interrupting the middle.
Momentum Mastery™
Clarity → Action → Momentum
Stop Starting Over. Never Return to Zero.