If you compromise what you're trying to do just a little bit, you'll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you're suddenly really far away from where you're trying to go.
When I was older and I first started working, I was obsessed with buying my first Chanel jacket. I saved up my hard-earned money, went to Barneys, and bought a little black Chanel jacket. It saw many, many job interviews and many, many events. I'm not fitting into it lately, but I still have it.
I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.