Yet the only thing that most people think of doing is taking the person out to dinner and buying them drinks. Like the Qwerty keyboard, it does its job, even though the results may be less than they could have been. On a deeper level, path-dependency affects the way we think about everything. Think, for example, of a mistake you've made or bad experience you've had. That way, you don't have to conceive of those experiences as outright losses.
People tend to make the same mistakes again and again.
Bad experiences add to our lives, but not necessarily because we learn from them. But it does mean that it's worth it, at least once in a while, to consider why we end up doing things the way we do them. The greatest hindrance to achievement is not lack of intelligence, but rather the failure to be imaginative, to make commitments and take risks. In my English class a few days ago, a professor returned midterm papers to his students, who were mostly juniors and seniors. Yet he was disappointed with them nonetheless.