What if money was no object?

Today on Facebook, an old school friend shared the above video, in which the late British philosopher, Alan Watts, in a gentle, fatherly and wonderfully mellifluous tone, makes a strong case for pursuing whatever activity we would desire if money was no object.  This beguiling thought inevitably got me thinking about the dilemma faced by most first-time or would-be authors. Most people I know seem to have, at one time or another, thought of writing a book. And while the flood of self-published e-books appearing on Amazon might suggest that an increasing number are now moving beyond the “thinking” stage, I wonder if we’re just seeing more of the iceberg that was always there, and that Amazon has merely raised the specific gravity of the sea in which that iceberg floats. So why this reluctance to move from thought into action? In my case, it was a combination of the following, that for 25 years conspired to keep Connected from being written: I don’t have the time and I can’t afford to stop working. Am I deluding myself? Do I even have what it takes to write a whole book? What if I invest all that time and people hate it? The suspicion, most eloquently articulated by the late, great, Christopher Hitchens, that while most people have a book inside them, “in most cases that’s where it should stay.” Of course, countering these seeds of doubt is a more encouraging set of thoughts which I’m sure every indie-author (myself included) has used to bolster an occasionally fragile ego: Everyone has a...