Phil Yates had never cut anyone’s hair before he decided to retrain at the age of 60. Yet inside the dissatisfied executive a ‘rocking barber’ was waiting to emerge Phil Yates was nervous about telling his dad he wanted to be a barber. “Get a trade! Don’t leave a job unless you’ve got another job lined up!” were his mantras. Therefore, he says: “I was expecting the worst.” But when Yates plucked up the courage to tell him: “I’m kicking marketing down the road. I want to do this,” his dad replied: “That’s fantastic. Life’s so short.” Yates was 60. Did parental approval really matter? “It almost made me cry,” he says. His father, a fishmonger turned factory worker, had lived on the streets as a child. “It was huge for him to drop the whole thing about being safe and secure and say: ‘Go and do what you really want.’” Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60? Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here Continue reading...