The Middle of the Project method: Where to restart a stalled activity

Imagine you've missed the sunrise for the past 300 days. Would that mean you'd give up on sunrise forever?We know the answer to the question, don't we? Even if we snoozed right a few hundred sunrises, it's possible for us to wake up on the 301st day and bask in the glow of a morning sun. And yet when it comes to projects, we often treat a stalled project as a form of failure. Why do we follow this crazy method of giving up? And how to we restart a stalled project?