187 | BEAN SOUP THEORY: WHAT BATGIRL TEACHES ABOUT QUITTING

This episode is sponsored by GBM Casting

Last week I talked about oversharing and keeping your powder dry. About how talking too soon creates unfinished business that lives in other people's heads, and how restraint isn't weakness, it's strategy. It's about protecting your ability to move when you need to, without dragging a trail of emotional debris or loose ends behind you. If that hit a nerve, go back and listen.

In today's show I'm looking at Bean Soup Theory, and knowing when to stop. I've already done a show on a similar topic called Why It's OK to Give Up, but here I go into the theory that backs it up and why, rather than pushing on, you may want to quit while you're ahead and move on. And I realize that this may seem at odds with another show in this season which is about completing incomplete loops, but I always come back to the same Peter Drucker quote: there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Picture this. You're in your kitchen. You've decided to make bean soup. You've pulled out the pot, chopped the vegetables, measured the stock. You're halfway through the process when something shifts. Maybe you taste it and it's not right. Maybe you realize you're not actually hungry for bean soup. Maybe it's the wrong meal for the day, or you've just lost interest in the whole idea.

You stand there looking at the pot. The vegetables are already in. The heat's already on. You've already spent twenty minutes on this.

And then this reasonable though arrives: "I might as well finish it."

That thought has nothing to do with hunger. It has nothing to do with whether the soup is good, or whether you'll actually eat it, or whether it even makes sense anymore. It's about discomfort. Discomfort with abandoning a process once it's in motion. Discomfort with the idea that effort might go unrewarded.

You've already invested. So now, stopping feels like waste. Finishing feels like obligation.

So you keep cooking. You add the beans. You let it simmer. You season it. You serve it. And maybe you eat it, or maybe you don't. But either way, the decision to continue had nothing to do with wanting bean soup. It had everything to do with not wanting to feel like you wasted your time.

That's Bean Soup theory.

Bean Soup isn't a formal academic concept. It's an informal metaphor that emerged from online discourse, particularly YouTube video-essay culture, as a way of explaining cognitive biases that have been studied for decades. Concepts like sunk cost fallacy, escalation of commitment, and loss aversion.

While there's no definitive origin, the framing is consistent with the work of video essayists like Dan Olson, whose work repeatedly examines how effort, obligation, and identity lead people to continue with failing projects, media, or beliefs. I couldn’t find an exact origin of Bean Soup theory so to me it functions as modern folklore, and an accurate shorthand for sunk cost thinking.

The soup metaphor is ordinary and non-dramatic. Nobody stakes their identity on bean soup. Nobody builds a three-year plan around it. It's just a small, everyday decision that reveals a pattern. And that pattern scales. What's true for soup in your kitchen is true for the feature film you're writing, the business you're building, the client relationship that stopped working six months ago, or the career direction you're no longer sure about. I’m considering it now for this podcast – should I stay or should I go? What are the advantages to keep going versus the time and cost and energy commitments, what do I lose by doing this and what do I gain.

Once time, energy, money, or identity has been invested, stopping feels emotionally expensive, even if the outcome no longer fits. The brain treats past effort as something that must be justified. So decisions stop being made based on usefulness or relevance, and start being made based on avoiding waste or regret.

This isn't about quitting. It's not about motivation or grit or discipline. It's about judgement under momentum.

What happens when effort already spent starts making decisions for you, and how people end up continuing with projects, plans, or identities long after they've stopped making sense.

The sentence that traps people is reasonable-sounding. "I've come this far."

But it turns effort into a debt. From that point on, decisions are no longer based on usefulness, relevance, alignment, or desire. They're based on pride, identity, avoidance of regret, and fear of waste.

This is where productivity stops being about output and becomes emotional accounting.

"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." Theodore Roosevelt

Once effort is treated as something that must be redeemed, people stop asking the right questions. They stop asking, "Does this still make sense?" or "Is this what I want now?" or "Would I start this today?" Instead, they ask, "How do I justify what I've already done?" or "How do I avoid admitting this was wrong?" or "How do I finish without losing face?"

This is how projects turn into obligations instead of choices.

At some point, many projects stop being about what they produce and start being about what they prove. They become about proving you're not a quitter. Proving the effort wasn't wasted. Proving earlier decisions were justified. Proving you can endure discomfort.

This is where burnout hides. Not in work itself, but in continuing without belief. You're not burned out because you're working too hard. You're burned out because you're working hard on something you stopped believing in months ago, years ago even, but you can't admit that to yourself because it would mean all that effort was for nothing.

And that's unbearable. So you keep going. You keep adding to the pot. You keep stirring. You keep tasting and adjusting and trying to make it work. But the fundamental problem, the thing you realized halfway through, never gets addressed. You just keep cooking.

Most people don't make one catastrophic decision. They drift.

One more week. One more revision. One more tweak. One more attempt. One more conversation with yourself about how it'll all come together soon. No single moment feels decisive enough to stop. Every individual day feels manageable. Every single session feels like progress, or at least like activity. So the drift continues.

Bean Soup thrives in drift because stopping always feels premature, even when continuing no longer has a reason. There's always something you could adjust. There's always one more thing you could try. There's always a version of this that might work if you just push a bit harder.

And that's another trap. Because "one more thing" never ends. It just extends. The project doesn't get better. It gets longer. The attachment doesn't deepen. It solidifies. You're not moving toward completion. You're moving away from escape.

Drift is how Bean Soup survives undetected. Because if you never make a clean decision, you never have to face what you actually think about what you're doing.

And drift gets worse when other people get involved. Imagine you've shared your bean soup recipe online. Someone in a group chat says, "What if you change this ingredient? What if you add that? How can I make this without the beans? I'm allergic."

Now you're not just drifting on your own sunk costs. You're drifting through other people's suggestions, accommodating their preferences, adjusting for their feedback. The soup was never right for you, but now it's being redesigned by people who aren't even eating it. One more tweak to satisfy someone else's comment. One more revision because they had a thought. One more accommodation because you shared too early and now they think they have a say. I’ve already discussed hijackers this season, but you seriously need to watch out for this.

If you don’t you'll be trapped by your own effort AND by other people's interference. The project stops being yours entirely.

In most cases, the practical cost of stopping is smaller than people imagine. The real cost is emotional. Admitting misjudgement. Letting go of a past version of yourself. Accepting that effort doesn't guarantee payoff. Mourning a future you'd already rehearsed in your head, the version where this all worked out and justified everything you put into it.

That's why people keep cooking soup they don't want. It's not about the soup. It's about the identity of being someone who finishes what they start. It's about the story you tell yourself about who you are. And when that identity is threatened, stopping feels like losing yourself, not just losing time.

This matters for creative people because capable, experienced people are often more vulnerable to this, not less. Think about it. You've succeeded before by persisting. You've been rewarded for endurance. You've built a career on seeing things through. Your identity is tied to resilience.

So when something stops working, your instinct isn't to reassess. It's to push harder. Because that's what worked before. That's what you're known for. That's who you are.

But here's the problem. The skills that got you here can trap you.

Competence creates confidence. Confidence creates commitment. And commitment, when it's no longer attached to belief, turns into inertia.

This is how competence turns into a liability.

You're so good at enduring that you forget to ask whether endurance is the right move.

You're so practiced at solving problems that you don't notice when the problem isn't solvable, it's structural.

You're so invested in being the person who doesn't quit that quitting stops being an option, even when it's the smartest thing you could do.

Bean Soup only becomes useful when you separate three different decisions that people constantly collapse into one.

Continue. Stop. Reframe.

• Continue is when belief still exists and the direction still makes sense. The work is hard, but it's the right hard. You're tired, but you're not lost. The effort is worth it because the outcome still aligns with what you want. That's continuation. That's legitimate persistence.

• Stop is when the outcome itself is wrong. Not just difficult. Wrong. The project doesn't fit. The direction doesn't serve you. The goal has changed or was never right to begin with. Stopping isn't failure. It's correction.

• Reframe is when the outcome is wrong but the work still contains value. The original plan doesn't work, but pieces of it do. You're not abandoning everything. You're keeping what's useful and discarding what's not. Reframing is surgical. It requires killing the old version so the new one can actually exist.

Most people don't consciously choose any of these. They default to continuation. Because continuation feels safe. It feels responsible. It feels like what serious people do.

But continuation without belief is just expensive waiting.

These are tools you can use right now to figure out whether you're in Bean Soup territory.

First test. "If this required starting from zero tomorrow, would I still say yes?"

Not "would I do it again knowing what I know now." That's different. That's hindsight. I'm asking: if all the effort disappeared, if the sunk cost evaporated, if you had to begin fresh tomorrow with no momentum and no obligation, would you choose this?

If the answer is no, you're not protecting the work. You're protecting the beans.

Second test. "If I could keep only 20% of this work, would I still want to continue?"

This test forces you to identify what actually matters. If you had to strip everything down to the essential core, what would you keep? And if you kept only that, would the project still be worth doing?

If the answer is no, you don't want to reframe. You want to rescue the effort. And that's the trap.

Hold those tests in your head. Now let me show you what Continue, Stop, and Reframe actually look like at scale.

Economist Peter Jacobsen, who writes about decision-making and economic reasoning in culture and media, used the cancellation of Batgirl as a clear real-world example of sunk cost fallacy. Writing in The Daily Economy, Jacobsen argued that much of the public backlash misunderstood how rational decisions are made once money has already been spent. As he put it:

“Many who argued the movie should be released did so by invoking one of the most common economic fallacies… the question on whether releasing Batgirl is a good idea has nothing to do with the $90 million already spent on production. That money is a sunk cost. What matters for the studio is whether releasing the film would bring in more value than it would cost going forward.”

Batgirl was cancelled outright and, years later, has still not resurfaced in any form - reinforcing the point that the decision was a clean stop, not a pause or a negotiating tactic.

The Batgirl decision is uncomfortable because it violates a story people want to believe. That once work is done, it deserves to exist. That effort creates entitlement. That finishing is a moral obligation.

By the time Batgirl was shelved, the film was effectively complete. The money was already spent. The labour had already happened. Releasing it would not have recovered that effort. It would only have added new costs. Brand damage. Opportunity cost. Marketing spend. Creative debt that would ripple through future projects.

This is Bean Soup logic at scale. Finishing does not redeem sunk costs. It only affects future ones.

The outrage around Batgirl proves how deeply people confuse effort with entitlement. The work already happened. People worked hard. That's real. But effort does not create a moral obligation to continue when new information changes the calculation.

The studio looked at the situation and asked the right question. Not "how much have we already spent," but "what does releasing this cost us going forward?" They stopped. Cleanly. And people hated it because it forced them to confront an uncomfortable truth. Sometimes the smartest move is to walk away, even when the work is done.

For solo creatives, the psychology is identical. It's just on a smaller scale. You're not dealing with studio budgets or public backlash. You're dealing with your own internal voice saying, "But I've already put in so much time." That voice doesn't care whether the project still makes sense. It only cares that you finish what you started.

But finishing something that's wrong doesn't make it right. It just makes it finished. And finished doesn't mean successful. It doesn't mean useful. It doesn't even mean done. It just means you kept going until you ran out of excuses to stop.

Bean Soup is held together by one lie. "If I finish this, it will make the effort worth it."

That's false. Finishing does not redeem sunk costs. It only determines whether you add more cost. Stopping feels worse than continuing because it forces you to accept that effort doesn't guarantee payoff.

That's not a productivity problem. That's an identity problem.

Stopping isn't failure. It's a skill most people never practice. It requires separating effort from obligation. Allowing sunk costs to remain sunk. Redefining success as correct exit, not heroic endurance.

Most systems teach persistence. Finish what you start. Don't be a quitter. See it through. But persistence turns into stubbornness, and stubbornness turns into self-destruction.

Very few systems teach judgement. Very few give you permission to stop when stopping is the smart move.

Let me give you some clean reframes to leave with.

Effort spent is not a debt owed to the future. Not everything you start deserves to be finished. Endurance is only virtuous if direction still makes sense. Stopping is a decision, not a confession. You don't owe the outcome. You owe yourself an honest next step.

This week, go back to those two diagnostic tests. "If this required starting from zero tomorrow, would I still say yes?" and "If I could keep only 20% of this work, would I still want to continue?"

If the answer is no, you're not protecting the work. You're protecting the beans. And the beans don't care about you.

Stop cooking soup you don't want. Let the effort count for what it taught you, not for what it forces you to finish. Make the call based on where you are now, not where you were six months ago.

That's Bean Soup theory. And once you see it, you'll see it everywhere.

Thanks for listening. I know your time matters, and I appreciate you spending a part of it here with me. If something in this episode stuck, take it with you and see how it plays out over the week. I'll be back soon.

In next weeks show I'll be discussing how Time isn’t something you manage. It’s something you run out of. And because most productivity advice avoids that truth, I break down nine lessons from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and look at what finite time really means for creative people. It isn’t about doing more. It’s about choosing better, accepting limits, and focusing on what actually matters while you still can.

Now, take control of your own destiny. Keep on shootin' and join me next time on FILM PRO PRODUCTIVITY!

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Bean Soup Theory explained through Batgirl. Why sunk costs trap creatives and when quitting is the smarter, more productive decision.

This episode is sponsored by GBM Casting

who have been supplying SAs to the screen and media industry throughout Scotland for over 20 years. We know our people and we know when they’ll fit for you.

https://www.gbmcasting.co.uk/

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