So many quotable passages here.

The whole “most people don’t succeed in their 20s” thing is spot-on. I’ve been meditating about that a lot lately. I think as young people we tend to compare ourselves to other young people who have achieved greater success even if it’s in a totally incomparable field like performance or music. In some fields, people do peak young, but writers don’t typically peak young.

We should also acknowledge that when we see successful people, we typically only see their successes today. We don’t see all the flops and failures and slush pile novels they wrote ten years ago when they were just like us.