I used to play the game Uniball. In that game, you were a ship trying to score goals in this space hockey/soccer world.
One time, there was a player named Hajile in the game(which comes from Elijah backwards) who was a skilled player. He was good at shots and dribbling and teamwork. I remember one specific game where he took a shot off of the wall that would bounce into the goal. He took the shot, but it ended up that it bounced back to his ship and he shot it again, not making it the second time. He then mentioned something like “it was the first one”.
Why do I bring up this very specific occurrence? It is not just to bring up the game Uniball. It is to bring up the idea that there are analogous occurrences to this in life. There are times where the first thing you would have done would bring up the outcome you were looking for, but any second or third attempt would not work out. Any further attempts to catch up would only contribute to a form of the sunk cost fallacy.
If you feel a moment like this coming up in your life, realize that you want to toss off that attempt, and move on to the next thing. The sunk cost fallacy can consume people’s existences if they let them.
Maybe you were going to reach out to someone in public, or by e-mail, and there was a window of opportunity to reach for them. After that moment, not only did you miss the moment, but you now start having poor thoughts that build on top of each other.
You move on to the next thing.
Hajile would often bring up great insights, and this was a nice feature. I found him to be an intelligent person. The Uniball community has diminished to near nothing over time, but it was a nice grouping of 200-300 individuals around 2000-2010.
If you ever think you had a moment that was a “it was the first one”, you’ll feel it a little more poignantly now.