How to restart a dream you gave up on

There is a particular experience that brings people to this: an ordinary afternoon, a song or a photograph or a line of your own handwriting in an old notebook, and the thing you set down years ago is suddenly entirely present, as though no time had passed.

That experience is disorienting because it is evidence. A dream that survives years of deliberate neglect is not a passing interest. Interests fade when starved. Whatever this is, it did not.

First: find out what actually happened

You have a story about why you stopped. It is probably wrong, or at least heavily edited, because the story was constructed after the fact to make the stopping make sense.

The usual stories are “I wasn’t good enough,” “I ran out of time,” and “I realized it wasn’t realistic.” Underneath, the actual causes are usually more specific and much less damning: a particular rejection landed at a moment when you had nothing spare, or one person said one thing, or the plan was sized for a life you no longer had and the failure to meet it read as a verdict on you.

Do this properly. Try to establish roughly when it stopped and what was happening in your life at that point. Most people find something structural — a move, a job, an illness, a period of exhaustion — that explains the timing far better than any conclusion about their ability. That matters, because you cannot restart against a verdict you still believe.

Drop the old plan on purpose

The most common failure in restarting is trying to resume the previous attempt: same medium, same scale, same goal, same timeline, as though the intervening years were an interruption rather than a change.

They were a change. You are not that person, and the old plan was built for them. Keeping it means competing with a memory, and you will lose, because the memory has been edited to be better than it was.

Ask instead: given who I am now, with the obligations I actually have, what does this look like? Sometimes the answer is materially different from the old version, and better — a different form, a different scale, a different relationship to it entirely.

Restart smaller than feels dignified

The instinct is to restart seriously, to prove it is real this time. Two hours a day. A finished draft in six months.

Do the opposite. Restart at a scale that feels almost embarrassing — fifteen minutes, one page, one evening a week. Not because you cannot manage more, but because your relationship with this thing currently contains a failure, and the only way to repair that is a run of small, uninterrupted successes. You need a stretch of weeks in which you did what you said you would do. The volume is irrelevant; the unbrokenness is the entire point.

Do it privately for a while

You do not have to announce a return. Announcing creates an audience, an audience creates a deadline, and a deadline creates exactly the failure conditions you are trying to avoid.

Work quietly until the habit is stable — a couple of months is usually enough. Then tell people, if you want to, from a position where the thing already exists and there is nothing to defend.

Expect the first weeks to feel bad

This is worth knowing in advance, because it accounts for most second abandonments.

When you return, you will be measuring today’s output against your best work from before. That comparison is doubly unfair: your skills are rusty, and your memory of the old work has been polished by time. Meanwhile your taste has continued to develop in the intervening years, so you can see exactly how far short the current attempt falls. The gap between what you can perceive and what you can currently execute is at its widest right at the restart.

It closes fast, usually much faster than the original learning took, because you are recovering rather than acquiring. But for the first few weeks it feels like proof that you were right to stop. It is not. It is the predictable shape of returning to anything.

Let the years count for something

You did not spend that time doing nothing. You developed judgement, taste, patience, a tolerance for difficulty, and probably a set of skills from whatever you were doing instead that turn out to be relevant in ways you would not have predicted.

Late-restarted work is frequently better than the original attempt would have been. Not despite the interruption — partly because of it. The person restarting knows things the original could not have known, including what it costs to set something down and how much they did not want to.

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This essay was written for unreasonablewhy.com. It is not an excerpt from the book — the book’s own opening chapters are published here in full.