The Detour Was Part of the Road

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Illustration Meera is invented. The drawer is not.

Imagine someone — call her Meera — clearing out a drawer on a slow Sunday. Out comes a name badge from two years selling shoes. Under it: the first forty pages of a novel, a certificate from a twelve-week coding course, and a lopsided mug from an evening pottery class she quit after the fourth week. Each object was, at the time, the whole plot. Now they sit together on the floor like passengers from different trains who got off at the same station by accident.

She isn't sad, exactly. She is doing arithmetic. Friends from college have job titles that sound like staircases. Hers sounds like a playlist on shuffle. The question she can't put down is simple and slightly embarrassing: was any of this on the way to somewhere, or was it just in the way?

This essay tries to answer her honestly, which means refusing both easy answers. The first says every detour was secretly destiny. The second says the wasted years were simply wasted. Both are stories. Neither is quite true.

1 The straight line is usually drawn afterwards

Read any confident career biography and you'll find a road with no potholes. The founder always loved building things; the novelist always scribbled in margins; the surgeon dissected a frog at nine and never looked back. Some of that is true. Much of it is editing.

Established Hindsight bias — the feeling, after the fact, that an outcome was more predictable than it was — is a well-documented tendency in psychology.

Memory behaves less like a recording and more like a newsroom. It keeps what fits the current headline and quietly files the rest. Once we know how a story ends, earlier chapters get re-read as foreshadowing, and the parts that foreshadowed nothing get cut for length. You don't need a laboratory to see it. Listen to someone tell their story at a job interview, and then again over a late dinner. The interview version has a spine. The dinner version has a lot more “and then, for some reason…”

This matters because Meera is comparing her unedited footage with other people's trailers. Those staircases probably had landings, false floors, and a year nobody mentions. The straight line isn't a lie, exactly. It is a map drawn after the journey, by someone who now knows which roads led home.

That doesn't make her path secretly straight. It only means the comparison was rigged before she started.

2 What travels, and what doesn't

The hopeful reply is “transferable skills.” They are real. The phrase is also the most overpromised line on a CV.

Some things genuinely travel. Two years on a shop floor can teach you to read a stranger's hesitation in about four seconds — browsing, lost, or one good question away from buying. That reading turns up later in interviewing users, managing a team, writing dialogue. Unfinished manuscripts teach structure: where a reader's attention rises and sags, when a scene earns its keep. A coding course teaches you to break a foggy problem into steps small enough to test. Pottery teaches you that your hands lie about what's centred.

But the transfer is partial and conditional. Instinct for customers does not make you a statistician. Understanding why an organisation's meetings feel stuck does not mean you can redesign its incentives. Skills travel best as habits of attention — what you notice, what you ask — and worst as credentials. Nobody hiring for a product role is impressed that you once balanced a till on a Diwali-week Saturday; the habit it built only counts when you can show it working somewhere new.

Interpretation “Habits travel, credentials don't” is a rule of thumb, not a law. Some fields reward a strange mix of backgrounds; others are strict about formal paths.

So the honest version is narrower than the motivational one. Some of what you learned comes with you. Some needs translation. Some stays behind with the uniform. Knowing which is which is itself a skill.

3 Exploring, or escaping?

Here is the harder question, the one Meera half-suspects. Were those turns curiosity — or a sophisticated way of leaving whenever things got difficult?

From the outside, exploration and avoidance can look identical. Both start something new. Both come with a fresh notebook. The difference lies in whether you're moving toward something or away from something, and it tends to show around the hard middle. The novel stopped at page forty — about where most drafts turn boring and structural. The pottery stopped at week four, roughly when beginners stop improving by accident and start needing deliberate practice.

A few rough signals, offered as questions rather than a verdict:

• Did you leave after learning what you came for, or at the first plateau?
• Can you say, in one sentence, what the thing taught you?
• When you picture quitting, is the feeling closer to “I've seen enough” or “I can't bear being bad at this”?

Now the counterexample. Sometimes leaving at the first plateau is exactly right: the plateau reveals that you like the idea of the work, not its shape. That isn't avoidance; that's information. And the same person can be exploring in one chapter and escaping in another. The point isn't to sort a life into virtuous and shameful piles. It's to notice a pattern before it starts choosing for you.

Open question Motives are mixed and memory is biased, so you may never fully know which a past turn was. The questions above are more useful pointed forward than backward.

4 When an experiment is a real investment

Not every detour pays, and treating every one as an investment is how people talk themselves into a fourth expensive course in a field they will never enter. But some detours are investments, and you can often tell in advance from their shape.

A genuine experiment has a question, a boundary, and a way to be wrong. “Can I write fiction?” is a mood. “Can I finish a 3,000-word story and show it to five honest readers by March?” is an experiment. It has a cost you've agreed to pay — some evenings, some money, some pride — and a result you'll recognise when you see it.

Good experiments also keep the downside survivable. A three-month technology contract is a test. Quitting a stable job with no savings to “find yourself in tech” is a bet. The bet might still work; it just isn't an experiment any more. It's a leap with a story attached.

And an investment compounds only if something is carried forward: a body of work, a relationship, a reusable method, a clearer no. A turn that ends with nothing written down, nothing made and nobody met is still part of your life. It simply didn't leave a receipt.

5 Honouring sunk time without romanticising it

Established The sunk-cost fallacy — letting what you've already spent decide what you do next — is a standard idea in economics and decision-making.

If you've spent three years in a career you dislike, those years are gone whether you stay or leave; only the future is still on the table. That's sound advice, and it can sound brutal, as though the past doesn't count.

It counts — just not as a debt you must keep repaying. Sunk time shouldn't decide your next move, but it can inform it. The years in a job you outgrew are evidence: about your temperament, your limits, which kinds of tired you recover from and which you don't. Ignoring that evidence is as silly as being imprisoned by it.

The romantic error runs the other way. It insists the lost years were secretly perfect — that you needed the bad manager to become who you are, that the failed venture was the universe's tuition fee. Sometimes something good did come of it. Sometimes it was just a bad manager. You're allowed to say: that cost me something, I learned a little, and the exchange rate was poor. Grief and gratitude can sit on the same bench.

None of this is a scoreboard of output. A slow year, a year of recovery, a year spent caring for someone: these are not failures to be justified later. They're part of the road too, and they don't owe anyone a lesson.

6 Telling the truth about a winding path

Which brings us back to the story Meera will eventually tell — in an interview, to a relative at a wedding, or only to herself on the next slow Sunday.

A truthful story about a winding path does three things. It names what each chapter actually gave — a skill, a constraint, a refusal — instead of inventing a master plan. It admits what didn't transfer, which makes the rest more believable. And it points somewhere: not a destiny, just a direction the evidence supports.

Same facts. Better editor. Nothing invented. That is the difference between a cover story and a true one: the cover story hides the turns; the true one shows how you read the map.