Make sure the life you’re chasing is one you’d actually want to live on a random Wednesday.

Ambitions get imagined at their highlights: the signing, the stage, the photo. Almost none of a life happens there. What you are really choosing is the texture of a normal Wednesday inside that life, including the travel, the admin, and the people you would be around at eleven in the morning for years. Something can be genuinely worth wanting and still be built out of days you would hate.

Take whatever you are aiming at and describe one ordinary Wednesday in it, hour by hour. Then find somebody already living that Wednesday and ask whether you got it right.