The biggest question I get anywhere I go, and this is five-year-olds and seventy-five-year-olds, is "how can I start?"...And there's this underlying question to that of "what book do I need to read?" "what certain life experience do I need to have?" "what's the right school I need to graduate from to start?" And my best, most simple advice is to completely throw that out, that that's not what it's about. People haven't been telling stories for thousands of years to all get published in Harper's. Let go of this idea of perfection. Because that's not what it's about. It is to connect, I think, it is to make sense of what it is to be human.

-- Phil Kaye, in this TEDx talk