Why leaving the day job can lead to a serious attack of piles

I did something horrible to my back earlier this year and for six weeks found that I couldn’t sit in a desk chair and work at my computer for longer than five minutes, even when dosed with ibuprofen, smeared with soothing unguents, and seared by a hot water bottle. 

So I lay in bed and tried to read Ulysses for about the tenth time. Failing, yet again, to get the point, I decided to have a paper cull instead. There’s nothing quite like sifting through a mountain of documents to give a chap a sense of purpose. 

When I left the BBC and set up my consultancy, Neil Morris, who’d been the same route, albeit on a grander scale, with Digital Public, asked if I now had an Everest of old papers in my office, purloined from work in the belief that they would all come in handy in my new life. 

“Of course I do.”

“You’ll never so much as glance at a single page.” 

I got sniffy. “There’s a lot of valuable background information in those papers. I intend to make full use of them.”

He grinned knowingly.

I moved the pile around occasionally during the next five and a half years to accommodate more recent material, but I was always careful not to actually read any of the old stuff. That should have told me something. But I knew with the absolute certainty of a climate change holy-roller that there was ancient knowledge as potentially valuable as Saxon treasure locked away in that tottering A4 heap.

Then came the day of reckoning.

I made a mound of paper on my bed, lay down, and started to sift, guessing that I could safely jettison about half of it, but expecting some tough decisions along the way.

When I had finished, some hours later, not a single page remained unshredded. Not one. 

So, if you’re planning on setting up as a media consultant, and you’re wondering whether it’s worth lugging home arm-stretching bundles of documents, my advice would be – you absolutely must do it! 

First, they’ll act as a security blanket in those initial anxious months as you wonder whether you’ve made a dreadful mistake. Second, the sheer pleasure involved in destroying what once ruled your life is cathartic. Third, there’s delight in remembering successful projects, the people who made them real, and all the fun and fighting and excitement of building services that people at home actually use – and enjoy. Fourth, there’s the calm joy to be derived from contemplating all your failures – the stuff that never quite worked or didn’t get made at all – and realizing you don’t have to do any of it ever again!  

In our game, it appears that it’s the knowledge locked away in your head that actually matters.