Talking careers recently with a friend who became a software developer a couple years after university, his take was that no matter what you're trying to pick up now career wise, nothing could be as hard as your first entry into a professional field.
A similar thought occurs when I go back to a habit or practice which had fallen off for some time: "thank goodness I learned this already. I couldn't imagine having the willpower to try to do it from scratch now"
"fall off the wagon" - verb (idiomatic): To cease or fail at a regimen of self-improvement or reform; to lapse back into an old habit or addiction. - wikipedia
Have you ever slacked off or gotten rusty at something you found useful before? Whether you are burnt out, have other priorities, or just are in an environment that makes it harder, if it really was a useful practice, at some point you may want to pick it up again.
Most of self-improvement talk is skewed toward learning stuff for the first time, so here are some thoughts on what getting back on could really look like in practice:
- getting up: no real restart until you admit you've fallen off.
- temporarily sucking at it: welcome missteps - sometimes it takes a few to remember, relearn or reinforce what you knew already.
- remembering the basics: with practice, what you learned before comes back.
- hitting old milestones: working back up to first being as good as before, then hopefully even better.
- improving technique - every go around is a chance to improve or correct things you missed before.
- new approaches: trying to doing things a little differently from the first go as a novice.
- dodging bullets: easier to spot the bumps in a road you've been on before.
- reaping benefits: keep long enough at it to enjoy the benefits that made you want to practice it.
- holding on this time: awareness of what made you fall off before, helps you move differently to avoid it happening again.
Yes, you fell off but the cool thing about getting back on the wagon is, if you've done it before, you can do it - even better - again.