The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger than Your Business Card

by Christina Wallace

Change is the new normal.

Building something from nothing can be terrifying, but it also can give you the space to think beyond the status quo and imagine something bigger, something better.

In the fifteenth century, the ideal of the polymath Renaissance man came into being, defined as one with “unquenchable curiosity.”

No one embodied this ideal better than da Vinci; he was an artist who was also an inventor, botanist, architect, poet, mathematician, cartographer, and a whole bunch of other things.

shareholder-centric economy,

Companies have shifted from employee-centric business to shareholder-centric business

Then came a string of economic recessions, six in total since the late 1970s, including the Great Recession that stretched on for two painful years after the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. These were paired with stagnant pay rates: average weekly wages increased only 17.2% in total over the four decades from 1979 to 2019 (an average annual increase of about 0.43%), while the productivity of American workers increased by 72.2% over the same period.

According to the US Department of Education, the average annual cost of tuition, fees, room, and board at a four-year postsecondary institution was $2,809 in 1980 (or around $9,500 in today’s dollars); by 2021, it was closer to $26,000.12

Millions of Americans are collectively carrying more than $1.75 trillion in student debt—more than triple the amount in 2005.

The median house price increased by 40% in inflation-adjusted dollars between 1970 and 2017 while the median household income effectively stayed flat.13 By 2019, Americans spent twice as much on health care as they did in the 1980s.

the milestones of a successful middle-class American adult—a stable career, a house, a partner, and a couple of kids and/or mildly expensive hobbies, decent health insurance, the beginnings of a retirement nest egg, plus a little free time for relaxation, volunteering, or travel—

Trothing your long-term commitment to a company in exchange for an identity, some financial stability, and a chance to climb the corporate ladder is no longer a lucrative trade.

Your work can absolutely offer meaning to your life, but it should not be the meaning of your life. Instead, consider your identity through a wider aperture, taking your personal, professional, and relationship goals all into account to define your purpose.

an alternative model is one that redefines your future opportunities (and even your present ones) as a broad set of potential paths rather than a narrow, singular trajectory.

this new model offers the option to meet your needs (financial, developmental, social, and professional) through a combination of sources, rather than depending on one job, company, or industry to provide everything in one offering.

this model provides flexibility when it comes to time management, transitions, and rebalancing your commitments. Forget about a parochial definition of work-life balance based on an equal split of your time between personal and professional. Instead, this is about the ability to make time for important things, however and whenever they show up.

Identity. Optionality. Diversification. Flexibility. These are the four pillars of the Portfolio Life.

You are more than any one role or opportunity.

Diversification will help you navigate change and mitigate uncertainty.

When your needs change, you can and should rebalanc...

The term portfolio life was first coined in 1989 by Charles Handy in his bo...

He bristled at the notion that your life’s work should be one narrowly defined job and instead argued it could be a collection ...

While his definition was still work-focused, I expand the definition of a Portfolio Life more broadly to include relationships, co...

Yet research shows time and time again that age and experience can be a catalyst for new ideas, fast-growing ventures, and extraordinary creative success.

Similarly, Dutch economist Philip Hans Franses studied the peak creativity of 90 Nobel literature laureates, 100 of the most popular classical composers, and 221 artists who painted the most-valued works in the world, and found that these luminaries had lived, on average, two-thirds of their lives before they created their best work.

Or, as Proust is often paraphrased,

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.”

What they found were five “discovery skills” that distinguish creatives in business: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking.

“Associating, or the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields, is central to the innovator’s DNA,”

As Steve Jobs frequently observed, ‘Creativity is connecting things.’”

Doing just one thing is the riskiest career move you can make.

“Employment can be riskier than self-employment,”12 counseled Charles Handy in The Age of Unreason,

fulfillment. Building a portfolio could mean leveraging a hobby into a promotion or career pivot.

It could also mean developing a new skill set and connecting with a community through a volunteer opportunity while serving as a caregiver for your family.

From actors to dancers, to novelists to sculptors, to musicians to filmmakers, creators have long relied on portfolios of work to fuel their lives.

You could say it’s like becoming the CEO of your life. Yes, it’s a role that requires more responsibility and active management than following a preset path, but it also grants you autonomy, visibility, and intentionality in creating the life you want to live.

“Strength gives us stability. It’s about ensuring you have the roots to support movement without getting hurt. Flexibility gives us that movement, allowing us to respond to stimuli and adapt to new circumstances. You must have both to survive as a dancer.” Arguably you also must have both to survive as a human.

Because the very premise of a portfolio is that some things won’t work out but those that do will offset the losses.

a survey by Babson College in 2015 found that 41% of twenty-five to thirty-four-year-olds say the “fear of failure” was their biggest roadblock to starting a business.

Failure, like death, taxes, and running into your ex when you are in your rattiest sweats, is virtually guaranteed in life.

So instead of hiding from it, let’s learn how to get comfortable with it.

Novelist Mary Renault once wrote, “There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.”

Resilience is the capacity to bounce back from setbacks.

Adaptability is the skill of revising your goals or tactics to accommodate new information or a new reality.

Accept that your response to failure—including shattered beliefs about yourself, others, and your future—is totally normal and not some indication that you are flawed.

Reduce anxiety by controlling intrusive thoughts, including by recognizing when negative emotions are out of proportion to the reality of the threat you are facing.

Be open and honest about your failure. Bottling up or obfuscating failure can lea...

Engage in constructive storytelling in which failure is seen as a fork in the road, providing an opportunity to lean on strengths, imp...

Articulate your personal principles and be explicit and intentional about ...

Do you know why lifting weights causes your body to build muscle? Because the stress creates tiny tears in the muscle fibers, which ...

Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and into the realm of potential failure is like lifting mental and emotional weights. Take advantage of your failures to build strength so t...