#portfoliolife

because #iworkandcomehomelife just isn't as fun

“I work and come home.”

Just like having all your savings in a single stock, it’s a bit risky. You’re overexposed to the risks of work: a bad day at work is now a bad day of life; your sense of meaning and purpose is also dependent on work; and you don’t even want to think about what a lay-off might mean.

Instead, I prefer #portfoliolife: a way of diversifying your joy, de-centering work, and getting to do things like get good at crossword puzzles. Here’s my portfolio:

• Working as a Senior Advisor at SYPartners (part-time)

• Writing a book (more on this to come!)

• Supporting and enjoying time with my dad (who has Alzheimers)

• Getting good at being a swim parent for Arden (kid athlete nutrition, running her around to practices and meets)

• Getting healthy (nerding out about health and longevity, exercise 4-5x/week)

I’ll note that this idea is distinct from side hustle culture, in that this isn’t about diversifying your income streams. It’s about diversifying your joy. And I suppose more broadly, your experience of life as a human.

For a while after my mom died last year, I would have put “grieving” as one of the things in my portfolio, simply because it takes legit time to grieve and no one tells you to account for that. It’s the extra long shower with tears streaming down your face, or the 20 minutes you spend de-puffing your eyes before a meeting after a sweet memory pops to mind. Though I still think of my mom everyday and miss her something fierce, thinking of her doesn’t take me out of commission like it once did. Sometime last year, I was able to replace “grieving” with “getting healthy” and honor my mom by taking care of myself.

Other notes: I may get some side eye from my husband who did not make the list, nor did any friends, though they all bring me loads of joy and I invest energy in them. I tend to put things on my portfolio list that feel to me like “active” projects, as opposed to aspects of my life that I hope will be part of my life forever. My relationship with my dad is on this list because as an only child, I’m his caregiver, and I’m committed to enjoying time with him in a way far beyond the way I would have if he were healthy and still living in another state. “Getting healthy”, I hope, will one day become “Staying healthy” but I’m still at the steep end of my learning curve on all things strength training, supplements, protein intake, etc.

The point is that anything that feels like a significant project and that feeds your humanity is worthy of your portfolio, right up there next to work. Some things might be “productive” in the way writing a book is productive, but they don’t have to be! Atelic activites (or activities that are done for their own sake, not to achieve some outcome) are excellent portfolio activities as well. Maybe you just really dig getting good at crossword puzzles. You do it!

While I’m 50% in my role at SYP which allows time for other activities, you can certainly live a #portfoliolife with a full-time job. And in fact, it’s probably even more important to think of life in that way when work is licking its lips and looking at you with hungry, work-all-night-and-then-check-your-slack-before-you-get-out-of-bed eyes. Of course if you have a full-time job AND a young kid or kids, keeping the job and keeping the child alive might have to be the portfolio for a few years. But for better or worse, that time doesn’t last forever.

If you’re up for a quick portfolio activity, imagine (or just draw) a pie chart. The circle represents your total capacity for “projects”. How would your segment the pie chart with your projects today? Does that feel like the right portfolio? How might you want to scale up some pie pieces while scaling back others? Now try drawing your ideal pie chart. What’s different?

The thing I like about a portfolio mindset is that it’s an alternative to the mindset that there’s 1/ work, and 2/ everything else you can squeeze in after work takes its share. The other thing I like is that it’s become much clearer to me when I have to say no to new slices of pie. At the moment my pie is “at capacity”.

Ultimately, the #portfoliolife exercise is a way to ensure I’m putting my time where my values are. And as different chapters of life come and go, so too will my portfolio projects, like one of those age-adjusted retirement accounts.

So I’ll put it to you: What’s in your portfolio? I’d love to hear!

P.S. I’m so not cool at social media, which is why coining a hashtag is probably a bad idea for me. Seemed catchy. I figured I should at least google “Portfolio Life” and turns out there’s a whole phenomenal book out there on it! Though potentially defined in a different way. It’s now on the reading list.

P.P.S. It doesn’t escape me that figuring out a portfolio of projects is essentially what businesses do in their annual strategic planning. After all, there’s only so much pie to go around, despite the desire to put everything in the “top priority” category. What I find particularly interesting is when and how a business decides it’s at capacity. I would never discourage growth if that’s what a leader and business wants (most do), but I also like the idea that it’s not fundamentally necessary. I was particularly inspired by my friend, Ian Sanders’s post to that effect: