Much to love about this from Alan Jacobs.
To start with: the idea of "a text file with a few orienting quotations".
"I have a text file with a few orienting quotations, and one of them comes from the English novelist M. John Harrison:
The idea you have when you’re young, to reach the edge of what can be done with your abilities and find out what might happen if you went past it? You promise yourself you’ll try but then wake up fifty years later to discover that you were in fact always too sensible to push things until they fell over, in case people thought less of you. In your seventies, though, it doesn’t seem to matter any more what other people think. That’s probably the first phase of your life in which you can actually do what you want. And certainly the last.
I think about this a lot. And, not yet being in my seventies, I’d like to get a head start. But doing what takes you to “the edge of what can be done with your abilities” and saying whatever you want are two different things. Often what I want to say isn’t charitable or constructive, and the part of me that suppresses the utterance of my uglier thoughts is doing me a big favor. But the part of me that fears to push the envelope of my gifts … that part of me needs to be stifled. The problem is that there’s so much of it inside me."