Entrepreneur
Self-Employed

Dr Barrie H

00:01 My name is Barrie H. I don’t actually have a job description because I’ve got a, what’s these days called a portfolio career, which means I do a range of different things.

00:10 Right now I’m Chairman, Non Executive Chairman of an IT company. I’m a non executive Director or a private members club in Leeds which is also a conference and events business. Just become a part time director of a new company being set up, called Live Happier dot com. I’m also a writer, I’ve written a lot of books.

00:33 The books, again, fantastic. I eventually was able to set up my own business on the back of the fact that I was a published author.

00:40 Even when I was at University and had a research job and so on, I fairly quickly set up a company on the side so I’ve always had 2 or more things going on throughout my life, so I’m a serial portfolio careerist.

00:55 It was a Grammar School. Almost nil careers guidance in those days. You’re bright aren’t you, so you don’t, you don’t need careers guidance for that, and I fancied being a history teacher and, it wasn’t until I was 17 that I discovered that I couldn’t do that in those days without having done Latin at O level, but nobody told me that. So I looked around my options, it was Psychology or Horticulture, so psychology it was, which was a great decision for me.

01:28 I went to the University of Hull. I did my first degree at Hull University, so that was my first experience of Yorkshire and bizarrely 2 years after graduating from there, I end up back in Yorkshire and I’ve been there ever since.

01:40 But in particular I enjoyed meeting the more mature students and in psychology and sociology I did a joint degree in psychology and sociology, and that attracted some more mature students. People that actually had jobs and so on and I got on particularly well with them.

01:57 Yeah, I was terrified of doing factory work like my father did, so anything that would get me out of doing, what I saw as proper work was very attractive, so I kept delaying decisions. He was a tube drawer and then became a foreman in a tube drawing factory, and so that’s all I knew about and I knew those were the only jobs I knew about, I didn’t know about any of these fancy professional middle class jobs, I just knew I didn’t want to do that and as long as you stayed in education you could get out of it, and so that kept me going and got me into University.

02:26 He was delighted for me to go to University, the first, first one in the entire family that ever had any higher education.

02:31 Once I was at University we didn’t have any money, so we actually had to work for ourselves. I didn’t like asking my, my dad for money, he hadn’t really got it, so I just got extra jobs while I was at University.

02:44 I didn’t set out as an entrepreneur. I simply did what I wanted to do. Since then I’ve realised that a lot of what I’ve done has in fact been entrepreneurial. I am not sure the penny’s ever dropped, that I’m embarking on a career. Somebody interviewed me from the states actually, about 3 weeks ago and they were saying, you know how old were you when you embarked on your career and I said, well I’m not sure, I’m 66 now and I’m not sure I’ve worked out what I want to do for a living, and I don’t apologise about that cos that, to me that’s part of the fun, so I’ve never consciously embarked on a career. Now someone who’s written a lot of books on career management and how to find your own career and develop your own career and build your own rainbow and stuff like that, um, sometimes again I’ve been interviewed and said, isn’t this a bit embarrassing for you because you’re saying that you’ve never actually worked out what you want to do. I said, well actually I have worked out what I wanted to do, and what I don’t want to do is to plan far ahead. My idea of hell would be to come across a clairvoyant who really could see into the future and tell me, I just wouldn’t want to know that would take all the fun out of it.

03:57