Starting afresh is not often encouraged in today's society. We are usually taught to strive in a specific direction until we achieve results. However, sometimes, it is better to restart and consider an alternative direction. For instance, losing track of the original goal is much easier after being fixated on a subset of the facts over an extended time.
This can also happen in other life-sensitive decisions, such as staying too long in a country over moving somewhere else, staying too long with certain people you have second-guessed multiple times, waiting too long in a career you have never felt too engaged in, and so on.
<aside> <img src="/icons/light-bulb_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/light-bulb_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> At different stages of our lives, there could be times when restarting might be the most ideal decision. When that happens, we'll be stuck with either taking a leap of faith or drowning in an endless pursuit.
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The issue, most of the time, is the fear of losing all the countless hours already invested. However, the effort is preserved whenever one starts a new endeavour. I instead consider this the price for knowledge. The knowledge gained from the previous endeavour might not look glaring, but expertise is transferred, maybe not in the short term. Knowledge is intertwined, and prior life experiences always come in handy at a later date.
Everything we learn influences how we make decisions in the future. Whenever we start a new endeavour, it is often easier to pick up things in which we have related backgrounds. However, learning new topics is much more challenging. Over time, having a broad knowledge significantly improves our overall decision-making process.
<aside> <img src="/icons/light-bulb_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/light-bulb_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> Knowledge seemingly lost due to a fresh start is the price for knowledge. The returns might take time, but they eventually pay off.
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Starting afresh has many benefits. This includes giving one a broad view of how things could be better, what did not work well, and the previous process's flaws. Armed with qualitative information, this presents the opportunity to make better decisions, with the likelihood of a better outcome.
Similar to how we build software, software has been known to age as business constraints and requirements constantly change. After a couple of years with continually different constraints, cracks begin to show, and it becomes clear that the situation needs reassessment.
When I view the concept of restarting, it draws parallels with different definitions. It does not outrightly mean starting from ground zero. Sometimes, it could be likened to tearing a part of a task and addressing just that subset of the task afresh. Often, the common theme is that a lot of effort has been invested into whatever is being torn down.
As a software engineer, this could mean rearchitecting the sub-module of an entire system and addressing the strains plaguing just that module in isolation. For some writers, it could be rewriting the chapter afresh, while for others, it could be changing the entire plot.
In many of the things we do daily, there is a chunk that we've gotten so used to. Still, deep down within us, we're very much aware that it's no longer efficient to continue doing that, but we refrained from exploring other healthy alternatives.
It's a healthy perspective to periodically ask ourselves if restarting a particular endeavour could be a better solution to a problem than pouring countless hours of effort into something that could eventually turn out to be futile. This will require taking a bold step and an honest self-introspection. Nonetheless, the benefits are often immeasurable, especially when what you were previously doing was futile.
As I draw to the end of this piece, it begs that we ask ourselves how much we could improve when we take that leap of faith to restart previously futile endeavours - but this time differently with all the information and experience we've gained. Instead of constantly worrying about futility, how about we press towards another direction with a likelihood of a better outcome?