Even if you follow other people's advice and model successful people and their blueprints, you will still fail if you don't have confidence in yourself. Everything - absolutely everything - starts with you.
You have two types of writers: one like Proust who was locked in his room and wrote the masterpiece. And the other type was Hemingway who celebrated life and also wrote a masterpiece.
It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the master work. Now, I'm beginning what I could have started ten years ago. But I'm happy at least that I didn't wait twenty years.
This was the kiss I had waited for so long - a kiss born by the river of our childhood, when we didn't yet know what love meant. A kiss that had been suspended in the air as we grew, that had traveled in the world in the sovenier of a medal, and that had remained hidden behind piles of books. A kiss that had been lost and now was found. In the moment of that kiss were years of searching, disillusionment and impossible dreams.
Don't think about what you've left behind. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.