When your goal changes, you don’t lose the skills you built chasing the old one.

Abandoning a goal feels like wasting everything that went into it, which is almost never true. The discipline, the reading, the repetition, the way you learned to handle being bad at something: all of that went into you, not into the goal. Goals are destinations and skills are legs. Changing where you are walking does not take the legs away.

If you have recently let something go, list what you can now do because of it. Be specific, and include unglamorous things like turning up on time. Then look at where that list could point next.