It never gets easier. It shouldn't. We should hunger for something more from life. From ourselves.

Every day, you should ask yourself, how have I impacted my soul? How have I grown?
More often than not, I am surrounded by people who instead ask themselves, How much money have I made, and how much more can I get?

Mistakes get harder to make.
We don't want to fall. We don't want to fail.


John McPhee in the Paris Review-

INTERVIEWER

I suppose one of the hard things for a young writer is to learn that there’s no obvious path. 

MCPHEE

There is no path. If you go to dental school, you’re a dentist when you’re done. For the young writer, it’s like seeing islands in a river and there’s all this stuff you can get into—where do you go? It can be a mistake to get too great a job at first; that can turn around and stultify you. At the age of, say, twenty-one, you’re in a very good position to make mistakes. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—each time the mistakes become a little more costly. You don’t want to be making these mistakes when you’re forty-five. But the thing is, in steering around all those islands, and finding currents to go around them, they’re all relevant.