I know the feeling.
It’s late. You have an early morning. The work you put in tonight on this thing that isn’t your job, isn’t your income, isn’t your responsibility — the rational part of your brain is running its calculation. Could have slept. Could have prepped for tomorrow. Could have done something productive.
Instead you spent ninety minutes on this, and you’re not even sure you got better.
I want to write you a letter, because I’ve been exactly where you are. Many times. And I’ve spent enough time now on the other side of that feeling to have some things to say about it.
You Are Not Wasting Time
Let me start there. Not with a comforting platitude. With an actual argument.
The activities that look like “just a hobby” to an outside observer — and sometimes to you, in your most self-critical hours — are doing things that nothing else in your schedule does.
They’re giving you a problem that doesn’t involve other people’s expectations. No client to satisfy. No deliverable. No performance review. Just you and a skill and the clean feedback loop of whether it’s working. This is rarer than it sounds in a professional life built on others’ agendas.
They’re teaching you something your primary discipline stopped teaching you years ago. In most professions, after a decade or so, you’re executing competence rather than building it. You know how to do the things you do. The growth edge disappeared. But the beginner’s mind — genuinely not knowing, genuinely trying to figure something out, genuinely failing and adjusting — that state is generative in ways that competent execution never is.
They’re giving you something to care about for its own sake. Not for what it produces. Not for what it demonstrates about you. For itself. The craft itself, the small improvement itself, the occasional moment of it clicking. That relationship with an activity purely for the activity — that’s not frivolous. In many lives it’s the most honest thing on the schedule.
About the Guilt
The guilt is worth examining directly, because it comes in a few flavors and they’re not all the same.
One flavor is: I should be using this time for something that matters more. This is the hierarchy talking — work above play, productive above recreational, practical above pleasurable. The hierarchy isn’t wrong about everything. But it’s wrong about this. An adult who has no domain in their life where they’re allowed to simply be a beginner, to pursue something because it interests them rather than because it’s required, is an adult who is not bringing all of themselves to anything.
The consultants and executives I’ve met who had rich outside pursuits — who were genuinely absorbed in something beyond their professional identities — were consistently more interesting to talk to, more capable of creative thinking, more present in conversations. It’s not causal with precision, but there’s something there. The full person shows up.
Another flavor of guilt: I’m not good enough to justify the time. This one is particularly cruel because it creates a catch-22: you’re not good enough yet, so you shouldn’t spend time on this, but without spending time on it you won’t get good enough. The logic is designed to perpetuate itself.
The honest answer is that whether you’re “good enough” is irrelevant to whether the time is justified. You don’t have to be good at something to have a legitimate relationship with it. Beginners are allowed to exist. Adults learning new things slowly are allowed to do so. The person who will never be a professional magician but who finds genuine absorption and joy in the practice is not wasting their evenings. They’re spending them on something real.
On Starting Late
If you came to your craft as an adult, you’ve probably done the uncomfortable comparison — looked at the people who started young and calculated how far behind you are.
Stop doing that calculation. It’s comparing two different things.
The person who started at twelve is not a younger version of you. They’re someone who developed a completely different relationship with the craft, under completely different conditions, with completely different resources and deficits. Their trajectory is not your trajectory. The comparison doesn’t illuminate anything useful.
What you have that they often don’t: a wider world to draw from. The perspective of someone who has lived enough to have something to say, not just something to demonstrate. The self-awareness of an adult who can see themselves learning and make deliberate choices about how to learn, rather than absorbing everything unconsciously. The professional skills and life experience that turn out to be directly applicable in ways you didn’t expect.
These are not consolation prizes. They’re genuine assets. The craft you build from this starting point will be yours in a way that’s specific to your path.
The Question of Returns
Here’s something I’ve come to believe, and I offer it not as advice but as my own honest conclusion: the return on time spent in genuine pursuit of something you care about is not calculable in advance.
I couldn’t have predicted, when I was sitting in hotel rooms with a deck of cards trying to figure out why tutorials made it look easy, that this would eventually lead to co-founding a company, integrating magic into keynote speaking, performing at corporate events, and developing a perspective on craft and practice that I now write about. The return was invisible from where I was standing.
The time didn’t feel wasted in those hotel rooms, but I also couldn’t have articulated what it was building. I was following something. Absorption, curiosity, the satisfaction of a thing that was difficult becoming slightly less difficult. That’s not nothing. And often — more often than we’re willing to trust — it turns out to be the beginning of something.
Not always. Sometimes you pursue a craft for years and it remains exactly what it appeared to be: a thing you do because you love doing it, with no larger consequence. That outcome is also acceptable. It is, in fact, enough. A life that includes something pursued for its own sake is not a life that includes wasted time.
What I Would Tell Myself
If I could send a message back to the version of me who felt the most guilty about spending evenings on this — the one doing the calculation about what else he could have done, the one looking at the distance between where he was and where he wanted to be and wondering if the gap was closeable — it would be short.
Keep going.
Not because of where it will lead. Not because the time will be vindicated by an outcome. But because the pursuit itself is the point. The skill developing, even slowly. The absorption. The small improvements. The late nights where two hours became ninety minutes without your noticing.
You’re not wasting time. You’re spending it on something honest. That’s a different thing entirely.
The world has a lot of efficient time-spending. Not enough honest time-spending. The thing that makes the clock lie to you, the thing you do not because you have to but because you want to — protect it. Spend time on it without apology.
You’re allowed to learn. You’re allowed to be bad at something while you get less bad. You’re allowed to care about something that doesn’t make money and doesn’t improve your performance reviews.
You’re allowed to be in the middle of something, not knowing where it goes.
Keep going.