Belaboring your life for having gone down the wrong path is a short-sighted trap. Every pursuit, skill, and endeavor can provide fruitful material to build upon something else.
Rather than considering the waste of time returning to something you were once interested in, or regretting not having discovered something earlier, consider the following:
- Your attention landing on a rediscovered curiosity will have new connections and perspectives to add to something you once loved
- Bringing something out of the past is a huge value add in a fast-paced, flavor of the week information speedway world
Differentiation comes through combination of discrete areas, not from mastery. Often what you consider as waste is because it seems like such a departure from the thing you are now interested in, but that edge is exactly where the best ideas can grow.
I try not to be wasteful with things that I have messed up or think that I’ve created an error in. I try to find a way to recycle it back into something else, like a project at a later time that I think it would fit better in, because there’s a reason why it wasn’t working with whatever original idea I had. - Chiffon Thomas, On Learning About Yourself and the World Through M
I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow. - Austin Kleon, Idea gardens - Austin Kleon