Eventually, Doolin was given the push he needed to give up his generous salary and the bonus he had in the pipeline – but it came from an unlikely place.
“I had been thinking about it for several months. But then I read [Bob] Geldof’s autobiography, which is called Is That It?, and I started asking myself that very question. Was this really all there was to life?
“I wanted my girls to be proud of me and I wanted to be proud of myself and what I’d achieved. I realised that I had enough money in the bank to go from six figures to none, at least for a while. I took a step back, and realised that I didn’t need as much money as I thought to survive.”
At first, Doolin struggled with working on his own in his attempts to launch a business. “I’ve never had to work so hard in my entire life. I gave myself five down days, where I allowed myself to be low and depressed. There were moments where I asked myself: ‘what have I done?’”
But seven years on, Michael’s leap of faith has paid off: he runs a successful company, Clover HR, which turned over around £1m in the previous tax year and employs 35 people.
‘The golden handcuffs get shinier and tighter’
Doolin is not alone in having experienced the sensation of feeling trapped in an enviable position. “We see salary traps a lot, especially with 30- to 40-year-olds,” says Logan Naidu, founder of recruitment group Kernel Global. “There’s a constant pressure to earn more to fund a certain lifestyle. Walking away from it to get a job they might love is difficult.
“But I think there’s been a slight shift, where more people think that life is short, and they need to make the most of a job and seek self-fulfillment. That, of course, gets harder once people have kids.
“I’ve had somebody tell me that they cannot afford to earn less than £1m a year, because they send multiple kids to private school and have a hefty mortgage.”
