When emotionally invested, even seasoned professionals can ignore their own expertise. The speaker, a researcher, sought validation from biased sources like friends instead of conducting objective market research, proving that personal attachment can override professional discipline.
The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a fortunate "kill switch" for the speaker's unvalidated course on family travel. This demonstrates how external shocks can prevent entrepreneurs from investing further into a flawed idea, effectively saving them from a much larger, self-inflicted failure.