After living and working in the French Alps he moved to Oslo, Norway where he has resided since 2012. There he put his previous experience and training to good use, combining it with his passion for dogs and nature, launching his own dog-walking company.
Nearly five years after Matt Hein started working in finance in London, he’d had enough.
“You have to get in in the morning before your boss, and you have to leave after your boss because that way your boss think you’re working much harder than you are,” he says in a short documentary profile of his life posted on Vimeo last week. “It’s a competition for who can be sat at their desk pretty much wasting their life. That’s not a way to live your life.”
Today, Hein walks dogs in the Norwegian woods. According to the film, he’s finally found his bliss.
“Portrait of a Dogwalker,” by 21-year-old Norwegian filmmaker Fredrik Harper, chronicles the bearded Englishman’s decision to leave his job and head for the French Alps. He began dating a Norwegian woman and followed her back to Oslo. There, he realized his two great passions: Being outside and being around dogs.
The few dog-walking businesses in the Norwegian capital limited themselves to small city parks and seemed to be taxing for both the canines and their walkers, Hein noticed.
“I thought, wow, there’s an opportunity here. I’d love to be out there five days a week,” he says in the doc. “I basically get paid to be an adventurer and hang out with dogs.”
Now, he takes his white van and drives a pack of dogs out to the wooded nature parks outside the city and hikes all day with them.
“It’s so easy to think in our heads, ‘Oh, I can’t do this because I’ve got this and I’ve got that,’” he says. “No! Just change.”
