"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas Edison It seems pretty unlikely he actually said that verbatim but apparently he had a conversation with a reporter that was in the spirit of the quote so close enough. Also he never claimed to have invented the lightbulb. Anyway point being that not making explicit progress in something is (at least a good amount of the time) still progress. As in in order to do the thing that you wanted to do you had to resolve that issue you didn't know about first. So that was a necessary step along the way. For more specific problems (like those of mostly technical nature in game development), this approach is plenty. For more abstract lessons (of the sort related to broader project scope management and large macro game design decisions) certainly it's less applicable, and less guaranteed (because ability is not necessarily linearly correlative with time investment). In any case, even if a big project burns down at least you've strengthened the technical skills you used to make it.