It was Isaiah Berlin who inspired Charles Handy to quit his comfortable job and embrace the second type of freedom

I know exactly when it hit me. I was in my rather beautiful plantation-style house in South Malaya near Malacca, a lovely little town. I was the Shell manager for the area.

I was playing bridge with my friends who were in the Army out there and I suddenly thought, “This is not what I want to be doing with my life.”

I was supposed to be the manager of this branch but all I really did was keep friendly with my main customers, the heads of rubber plantations or government departments. This meant asking them to endless dinner parties or luncheons on the beach, which was all very pleasant.

Shell was a very benevolent employer. They guaranteed me a job for the rest of my life in various delectable parts of the world with a generous salary which would continue after I retired with a pension scheme.

I was trapped in a sort of comfortable prison. Then I remembered Isaiah Berlin. This rather wonderful, but slightly secretive, professor at Oxford didn’t teach much or write books. But every so often he would emerge and focus what he called his “intellectual spectacles” on some aspect of humanity which he would write up in a short essay which often radically changed the way I thought about things.

One that affected me was his essay on the two freedoms, the “freedom from” and the “freedom to”. At that moment, in my comfort zone in Malaya, I was enjoying “freedom from”: freedom from fear; freedom from poverty; freedom from worry; freedom from anything bad that might happen to me. Shell would look after me, I knew.

The trouble was, I had very little “freedom to”.

I was supposed to be in charge of my branch of Shell, but everything was controlled. I could suggest things, but I couldn’t decide anything on my own. Shell was run by endless rules and protocols and my team in Malacca were perfectly competent to do everything without me.

My job was to keep pouring wine down my main cutomers’ throats, which is not what I thought my life was meant to be about. So, I had freedom from worry but no “freedom to”. I was a sort of voluntary prisoner.

I resigned later that year, and returned to England. I remember sitting with my wife on our first evening back home. She produced a bottle of champagne to celebrate my “real freedom” as she called it.

I said to her, “But I’m only qualified to teach Latin to young boys at a prep school, which I don’t want to do, and anyway they would only pay me enough to feed our dog, not ourselves.”

She said, “I always hoped I would marry a professor who writes books, so why don’t you do that?”

So I said, “Well, I can try to do that but I don’t see how I can be a professor of something that I’ve never studied – and anyway, where’s the money going to come from?”

She said, “We don’t need much,” and I said, “Well, we need more than enough to feed the dog.”

In the end she found me a job teaching at the London Business School and I did write a book, and then many books, but it took a long time and I often wondered about my life at Shell. Why couldn’t I be content with sitting in the sun, giving dinner parties, playing golf, reading books and drinking wine with my friends?

But for some reason “freedom from” wasn’t enough for me. So I’ve been trying to talk with my teenage grandchildren about their future prospects, saying:

“It’s very tempting to opt for ‘freedom from’ by joining the army, civil service or some big corporation that will guarantee you work and money for the rest of your life. But like me, you will feel frustrated because really, secretively, you will want the ‘freedom to’ – the freedom to do what you suits you better. But in the process you may have less money than you’d like, and won’t be able to buy your children the education you’d like to, or live in the type of house your partner might enjoy. But on the other hand, you will be satisfied by doing something that you really believe in, whatever that is.”

Professor Berlin’s point was that you can’t have both, you have to choose. You will be pressurised to choose “freedom from” but you’ll feel frustrated. On the other hand, if you choose “freedom to” you may be resigning yourself to a life of poverty.

So I pass the professor’s dichotomy on to you and regret that I cannot offer a solution.

This is Charles Handy wishing you a great life whichever you choose.

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