Throw the bad draft out

Every trade has the same moment. The joint doesn't sit flush. The plan has a hole in the middle. The paragraph is dressed up and saying nothing. And you keep working around it because you paid for it with hours you can't get back.

Sunk hours feel like a reason. They aren't. The time is gone either way, and the only real question is whether the next hours go into something sound or something you're propping up. Men will spend a week fixing a thing a day would have replaced, because replacing it means admitting the week was wrong. Hours already spent cannot vote on what happens next. Say the part out loud: this piece is bad. Then you can move.

Throwing out a draft doesn't mean starting from nothing. There's usually one line, one measurement, one idea that was right the whole time, buried under the stuff you added to protect it. Find it. Write it on its own. Build again from there and watch how fast it goes when you're not dragging the dead weight. Most second attempts take a quarter of the time. That's not luck, that's what you learned the first round.

Not after one more pass. The longer a flawed thing stays in your hands, the more it looks like your judgment instead of your draft. Pull it apart while you can still tell the difference.

Find the one part of your current project you already know is wrong, and delete or dismantle it before you touch anything else.

Here's the part that makes the cut possible. If your worth rode on the work, scrapping a draft would be scrapping yourself, and no man can do that twice. But the verdict over you was settled somewhere else. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1). Peace already handed over, not earned by a clean build. Which means the bad joint is a bad joint and nothing more. You can look straight at it, call it what it is, and tear it out, because your standing isn't nailed to it. A man who is already accepted can afford to be honest about his own work. That honesty is most of what craft actually is.