“Don’t worry that you don’t know where you’re going.”
Gareth didn’t start with a grand plan
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says. “I was really looking at the short term, the here and now.”
Gareth grew up in Edinburgh, finished school, reached that point where a decision had to be made, and found himself doing what a lot of young people do when they are unsure…carrying on. University, he says now, was partly “a way of putting off that decision for another three years”.
Even towards the end of his degree, the future still didn’t feel settled. “We’re graduating soon,” he remembers thinking. “What am I going to do?”
So often, young people are told to talk about careers as if they unfold in straight lines. But Gareth’s story doesn’t, and neither does so many others. They begin with uncertainty, pressure, influence and plenty of guesswork.
Other people’s ideas shaped his early choices
When Gareth talks about how he ended up in accountancy, he is strikingly honest.
As a child, he lived next door to a couple who were both accountants. “I thought they were like royalty,” he says. They travelled, had new cars and seemed to live a life far glossier than the one he knew at home. His parents, both academics, could see it too.
“I’d actually say me going into accountancy wasn’t even my decision,” he says. “It was either my parents encouraging me in that direction or the fact that my friends at university were applying. I don’t think it was a conscious decision.”
Looking back, he puts it even more plainly. “The first couple of decades of my life, I think I did things because other people thought they were a good idea.”
Learning to choose for himself changed everything
For Gareth, the real shift came later, and he didn’t fully recognise it at the time.
He had qualified as an accountant and was working in a large firm when he made the first decision that felt like his. He left to become an accountancy tutor.
“I remember telling my dad, and he thought I was insane,” he says. From his father’s point of view, Gareth was walking away from a prestigious, well-paid career he had worked hard for. “Why on earth would you throw that away?”
But he did it anyway.
“That was probably the first time I did something that my dad totally disagreed with, and I still did it.”
Years later, after becoming successful in education and rising to the level of Managing Director, he did it again by leaving an established global company to build something of his own.
Again, people close to him thought he was mad.
Again, he did it anyway.
“I think that mental shift from doing things because other people thought they were a good idea to doing things because it’s actually what I thought was a good idea…” he says, trailing off slightly, as if even now the size of that change is still catching up with him.
Sometimes the hardest thing is disappointing people you love
“The biggest barrier you might experience to doing the things you want to do often comes from the people who love you most,” he says. “And it’s because they worry that you’re going to throw away a great career or lose a load of money.”
That feels especially true for young people starting out. Advice is rarely neutral. It comes wrapped in love, fear, class, money, experience, and ambition. Sometimes the people trying hardest to protect you are also the people making it hardest to hear yourself think.
“It comes from love,” Gareth says. “But actually, you’ve got to almost be doubly strong to be committed to your own pathway.”
He stopped seeing risk as something to avoid
Ask Gareth about risk, and he doesn’t answer in a way you’d expect.
“Risk is actually just the variability of outcome,” he says. “Zero risk, zero potential variability in outcome. I’ve not got time in my life for that.”
He talks the same way about failure. Not as the opposite of success, but as part of it. “I think you can’t have success without failure,” he says. “Failure to me is just an absolutely normal, natural and actually necessary part of getting to success.”
That is not just a theory for him. He talks openly about business failures, about hard personal periods, about depression and about not wishing those years away because they are part of who he is now.
“With hindsight, I would not wish away the downs,” he says. “Life is about contrast.”
He learned to trust the butterflies
Before difficult conversations or big decisions, Gareth says, he gets butterflies.
These days, he pays attention to them.
“For me, that manifestation of adrenaline is the butterflies I feel in my stomach,” he says. “I’ve learned that that’s actually, for me, an indicator of whether something matters to me.”
He used to tolerate that feeling. Then he learned to embrace it. Now, he says, “I chase the butterflies. If something doesn’t give me butterflies, I generally don’t bother with it. Why would I waste my time with it?”
Young people to know they don’t need the whole plan
Looking back, Gareth says there are two things he would tell his younger self.
The first is simple. “Don’t worry that you don’t know where you want to go. Don’t worry that you don’t know what your career is going to look like at this stage.”
He had no idea, he says, that he would go into accountancy. No idea he would end up in education. No idea he would become an entrepreneur. “That just wouldn’t have even crossed my mind.”
His career, he says, was not exactly squiggly, but it was “definitely a zig-zaggy career”. Every few years, an opportunity appeared that he had not even known existed.
“I’ve just always been really willing to grab opportunities,” he says. “I genuinely haven’t had that many opportunities in my career, but the ones I’ve had I have grabbed.”
Your network matters, even before you realise it does
Support, he says, did not always come from the people he expected. Often it came from people he did not know that well, but who were willing to help, connect, recommend or support him.
He calls them “soft contacts” and talks about the importance of building relationships over time, both in person and online.
“Your network is your net worth,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s the only value I bring to my business now is the people I know, the contacts that I have and the connections I can therefore make.”
The future belongs to young people who are ready to step in
For all his honesty about uncertainty, pressure and risk, Gareth sounds genuinely excited about what is ahead.
Yes, the world of work is changing quickly. Politics, economics, AI, sustainability, data…all of it can feel fast and unsettling. But he thinks there is opportunity in that too.
“I think particularly for young people today,” he says, “the pace of change… gives even more opportunities to young people to grab opportunities, to actually show their expertise.”
Senior people, he says, will not always adapt fastest. They will need younger colleagues to help guide them.
Young people are often spoken about as if they are behind, not yet ready, still waiting. Gareth sees something else. He sees capability, relevance and the possibility of being useful much earlier than they might think.
Form the Future works in that early space and helps young people hear stories like Gareth’s. Because this is where it starts. With perspective, encouragement and the chance to imagine a future that feels like your own.