Ambition is good. Having a dream, a goal, a deeply felt sense of how you want to move through the world, spend your time and energy, and earn a living is important. I wrote a whole book about hearing and honoring those inner promptings.

The book I’m still waiting to work on, navigating the labyrinth of publication rather than actually editing and finishing, which is what I thought I would be doing this summer.

I’m not great with down time. But I have been thinking about the difference between being steered by an inner sense of what you want to do and participating in an external structure that isn’t going to work. How do you know what is ambition and what is delusion?

I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life. When I was young, I coupled that with being famous and rich and all sorts of other sparkly things my youthful imagination made up. As I got older, and wasn’t getting published or remunerated for my work, I shifted that to focus on the writing, the creation, the art, which I love, and understanding that I would make my living doing something else.

I never wanted to be in advertising. I ended up there and found that it suited me; working with creative people, writing all the time, the dogsbody who would crank out RFP responses and bios and all the dull B2B scribbling that the “creatives” balked at. I made a good living doing it.

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