If I could give my former self advice

This (paraphrased) question was asked in an online writing community:  If you could go back in time and write a note to yourself on the first day you took up writing, what advice would you give yourself?

Here's my answer, which is a combination of my own thoughts along with the advice from some professional writers that finally got through to me:

Stop looking for shortcuts.  Stop thinking that you are a good writer because of how much you have read.

Write.  Finish what you write.  Word on the things you struggle with.  If you can't figure out how to finish the story, then figure out the next line.  You'll get there.  

You learn to write by writing.  So write.  You learn to finish stories by finishing them.  So finish them.

You can write 250 words in 15 minutes.  To be safe call it 30 minutes.  So if you write for only 30 minutes a day, that's over 90,000 words in a year.  That's a good sized novel.  In some genre's that's a novel and a half.  So if you will write for 30 minutes a day instead of quitting you'd have written 10-15 novels by now.  

According to the law of averages, some of them would have even been good.

So write you fool.