Suppose some expert said you had three days to live. And three days later, they said this was an embarrassing mistake; you're perfectly healthy, you have a vast life of indefinite extent ahead of you. In that moment, what thoughts would you refocus on? What would you say matters, and what turns into footnotes; apocrypha?
What's the chess piece of your meaning on Earth that's King, against which nothing else matters?
Suppose you deeply valued the uncertain extent of your future life and its capacity to achieve things. Not like, "I majored in 'bleh'" so I can't possibly dedicate my life to problem 'blah'" (different major), even though you probably could. "Could", if you had patience and humility to reinvent yourself. "I'm a front-end JS web dev, so I can't possibly throw that away and become a computational biophysicist". (Too much time!) Or nurse. Or hospital janitor. Or whatever you, personally, think is really, extraordinarily valuable but isn't "you" -- it's other people. When weighted against normal stakes, in normal modes of reasoning.
I don't know how to express these thoughts. But, something has to matter. There has to be some heuristic, some meta-level of cognition, where, you throw everything you'd normally get bogged down in, and recognize intuitively what you should, could, be doing, given all the opportunities given to you, stripped of your inhibitions and fears and artificial conceits. Maybe someone on HN understands this question better than me. I've spent maybe tens of hours reformulating this question over years, getting no-where; and the question got rephrased more sharply.
I'm not currently at the "this was an embarrassing mistake; sorry about that!" phase, but I don't throw away this twice-or-thrice-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reflect soberly, sincerely, if there's any chance I can find some insight. Even if it's incredibly embarrassing, which currently IDGAF about.
If it was 'embarrassing' to you, it wouldn't be a high priority for you anyway.
If it was 'embarrassing' for somebody else, why would you bother to care about that while you were chasing some goal of yours?
If you suddenly find you have a lot more time than the three days you were initially given, you could decide to make more of your life than before. But embarrassment doesn't really become a factor at all whether you decide one way or the opposite.