The Irish may have overtaken us as the hardest working nation in Europe, but there’s no doubt that our work-life balance is still heavily skewed in the wrong direction. So when the dustjacket of Malcolm McClean’s Bear Hunt poses the question “Wouldn’t it be great never to have to work again?”, we only need a fraction of a second to respond, enough time to picture leisurely days spent doing very little, while our private income takes care of such irritants as paying the butler. At the same time, we’re rightly suspicious of the notion of getting something for nothing, or achieving gain without pain. However, McClean isn’t offering a get-rich-quick scheme to turn our lives around – just a little bit of self belief. His book carries the subtitle “Earn your living by doing what you love”, and he aims to change our working lives so that we no longer consider our weekday rituals as “work” at all. “I enjoy doing what I do so much, that I never think about having to start work at a particular time,” says McClean, an amiable Northerner with an almost evangelical zeal. “And often it’s so enjoyable I don’t want to stop. It is possible to build that kind of feeling into all our lives, but many of us don’t believe that it is.”

McClean’s identity is inseperable from Bear Hunt; not only is it the name of his book and his business, he’s even referred to as “Mr Bearhunt” on his website. The phrase is taken from the children’s story “We’re Going On A Bear Hunt”, where a family encounters various obstacles in pursuit of a bear, and at the end of each page say in unison: “We can’t go under it. We can’t go over it. We’ll have to go through it!” McClean saw this as perfectly encapsulating his new approach to work – although, while at the end of the story the family run away from the bear, McClean pursues it avidly. He used to spend up to 100 hours a week working as a management consultant, resulting in a messy divorce, debts running into 6 figures and no home or family. To get himself back on track he wrote down “I want to do great things with great people” on a piece of paper, and began acting on it. Since then he has consistently turned the childlike, almost facile simplicity of ideas like this to his own advantage, and amid the encouragement he delivers in his book lie stories of people who have turned their own lives around in a similar way. But this is not praise of the process of downsizing; most of his examples have achieved considerable financial success as well. “I’m proud of developing my new way of life without having to wear sandals or eat brown rice,” he laughs.

The tales are extraordinary; the telecommunications engineer who became a vicar and ended up transforming one of the most run-down neighbourhoods in London, the man who decided that he was an explorer and eventually became the first man to trek to both the North and South Poles, the woman who left a career in PR to start a movement devoted to changing the world “for a fiver”. All of them have created magnificent successes from virtually nothing, and in reading the stories one can’t help being slightly over-awed. Does every one of us really have the ability to emulate these feats? “Well, if you don’t believe you can, then you won’t,” says McClean, who views doubting Thomases with disdain. But what if you have a mortgage to pay? Kids to feed and clothe? Surely having such lofty ambitions is tantamount to irresponsibility? “Again, this is the belief that we’ve built up. During the 40s and 50s there was a self sacrificing mentality left over from the war, and those attitudes and beliefs have been ingrained into us, too,” he says. “They can be very restrictive, but it doesn’t take much to break out of them.” The British may have cultivated a mindset where we don’t believe that we even deserve to enjoy our working week, but McClean is adamant that if you can earn a decent living doing something you hate, then you should be able to earn more money doing something you’re passionate about. It makes perfect sense on paper, but in reality? “Look, there’s no such thing as a job for life any more. Most of us are going to have to change what we do 4 or 5 times in our lifetime, so why not take control of that uncertainty? Grasp it, because in uncertainty lies a lot of opportunity. If you look for it.”

In his book, McClean combines a series of 8 ideas with the aim of slashing the grey, mundane canvas of our salary-accumulating lives. His background in management consultancy is betrayed by the use of brow-furrowing terms like “blinking into the zone” or “the sticky ball principle”, but the ideas behind them are inspirational – not least the concept of “thinking like an 8-year old”, which in many ways forms the backbone of the book. We all yearn to shake off our financial shackles, and for McClean, transporting ourselves back to a time before such worries had occurred to us the way to move forward. “Most of the great things that have happened to me over the past few years have been down to using this method,” he enthuses. “There are things that 8-year olds do with thought that adults have stopped doing, and rediscovering that can lead to new ideas.” Once the ideas are there, he argues, that’s the time for the adult mind to take over, to convert those ideas into reality. “For example, Sport England have spent £1.2bn in the past 10 years on trying to make people more active, and over that time activity rates have actually fallen. Now I’m helping them to find the imaginative possibilities they had as children, and applying them to the problem. And this idea is working – in the real world, to big stuff, to important stuff.”

McClean admits that successfully applying the dizzy and random inklings of an 8-year old to a business model requires bravery (“Get your courage to spill out all over the table,” he advises) and a little bit of luck. But while he believes that courage cannot be taught, he also believes that the ability to be lucky certainly can; indeed, one of the chapters of the book is devoted to cultivating good fortune. “Everyone mentioned in the book gets out there and makes their own opportunities,” he says. “And, just as importantly, they grasp all the good things that can come out of bad luck.” Chris Joyce, a former drummer with Simply Red who jacked in his musical career in order to open an Italian delicatessen in Manchester, is an example cited in the book. He was strongly advised by accountants not to proceed with his project, but he ploughed ahead regardless and came out on top. He was an impetuous decision maker for whom hot-headedness paid off, but can it really be like this for everyone? “I’m obviously not saying people should ignore advice,” replies McClean, “but Chris was lucky for a reason. He constantly does the things that lucky people do, trusting his instincts, and working around the subsequent obstacles – it’s the typical behaviour of an entrepreneur.”

McClean’s dream is for his idea to catch on. “It would change the whole nature of society, and the way we view work,” he says. “If people have passion, they learn more easily, take a few risks, connect with each other better, and new business ideas spring up.” However, while reading his book it’s difficult to ascertain what McClean’s business idea actually is, and how he earns a living. He laughs. “Well, that’s deliberate,” he says. “If I write down my job description, I start conforming to it. The idea of simply doing great things with great people allows me to do whatever feels right.” He admits that the usual business obstacles – the VAT man, the Inland Revenue – never go away, but Bear Hunt allows him to be in the right state to deal with them, and hopefully go on to achieve his dream. “After all,” he says, “did Martin Luther King say ‘I have a strategic plan’?”