At the age of 50 I decided I wanted to be a writer. I hadn’t written a word of fiction since high school, but a couple of years after making the decision, I had a draft of the story that would become The Rosie Project, and three years after that a publication contract. I’m now a full-time writer with half a dozen bestsellers and three books in development as movies.
When I began the journey, I knew embarrassingly little about writing. But I had two lessons from my previous life that turned out to be as valuable as anything I’ve learned since.
The first was this: when you’re tackling a big or complex task – earning a
