A Chat With Charles Handy On The Portfolio Career.
You may already have started one.
I had the pleasure of hosting Charles Handy and his wife at our house a few years ago.
Charles is one of the most celebrated management theorists, having been ranked back in the day as the No.2 most influential management thinker in the world.
In short, he knows a bit about stuff.
As the author of over 20 seminal, best selling works, he has plenty to say, and it’s hard to pick a topic that he hasn’t conquered in his brilliantly crafted and insightful way.
He is - perhaps unknown to most - the inventor of the concept of the portfolio career. It’s a concept and aspiration I hear many people reference as a life goal.
It’s also a concept that many of us don’t know how to make real - or even know what it really means in the first place!
But it’s not a concept made of pixie dust, fairies and self-help gurus. It’s alot simpler to grasp than some might have you believe.
In short, a portfolio career is more than work. It’s an approach that advocates for building a life of many and varied diverse experiences, skills, and intellectual pursuits.
Likening life to a broad collection of stocks, Charles encourages us to diversify our life activities, akin to how investors spread risks and opportunities across various classes of assets.
This approach goes beyond traditional work-life balance, advocating that we weave a tapestry of our experiences and commitments for the 100 year life.
Yep, 100 years.
As we all live longer, the traditional path of education, career, and retirement is becoming obsolete. We're moving towards multi-stage lives with various jobs, intermittent learning phases, and personal exploration. This reality underscores the importance of building a set of diverse 'assets' like skills, experiences, expertise, relationships, and health - for a 100-Year Life.
After meeting Charles, I started to think more deeply about what a portfolio life could look like for me. More specifically, how I could treat myself more like an Inc. - or a company - designing ways to build multiple income streams, creating new connections and partnerships way beyond my current network, trying different experiences and exploring novel ways of working and living.
Basically, blowing up and challenging all my biased, narrow and predetermined thoughts about my life as it was.
My initial thoughts felt like a landslide; a hodge-podge of stuff that had been rattling in my pinball brain for years, roles I had never done but wanted to, businesses and ideas that I’d jotted down in note books but had no idea if they would work in the real world.
It was a little overwhelming, making my monkey mind just want to have a nice cup of tea and think about it all tomorrow.
But that’s a waste of a life.
It’s taken many years of inquiry, but like any pursuit worth pursuing, over time, I can tell you that it starts to become real. As in, really real.
Charles was right.
As a way to think about building a portfolio life (and therefore, career), here’s a framework to kick start your thinking.
Imagine a world where, instead of the normal and binary work-life separation, you have a discrete set of projects. Each project has a handful of goals you want to achieve, and a rough time scale attached; which could be weeks, months, years or even decades.
The point is, when you shift your mindset from “stuck in a job with nowhere to go, same old routine and wishing for more” to “I have a series of projects across my life, all in various stages of development.”, it’s utterly liberating.
Below are some projects to think about. By the end of this Jolt, you might well be closer to a portfolio life and career than you ever thought possible.
The first project to think about is your job.
So let’s start there.
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Project 1: your job. The day I switched from thinking of my job as a role I performed, to thinking of my job as a project for a client, was the day I freed myself from its emotional grip and the political sting that inevitably comes from working in organizations. I created a bunch of goals that I wanted to achieve for the client (i.e., my company), and that became my project, not the job itself. A client doesn’t own you, they hire you and pay for your expertise. It’s no different than a company, yet we often let a company own us way beyond the 9-5.
Project 2: working with a non profit. Finding a cause - any cause - is life affirming. It also makes you realize how much BS we shovel around while other people really need our help. Joining a board or advising a non-profit is a role we can all play. You’d be amazed at how much value you can add. Don’t underestimate your knowledge: no matter what career stage you are at. Non profits need you. I joined a board of a local charity 15 years ago, and, to this day, I still see and experience a side of life I knew existed, but had largely, unconsciously, ignored.
Project 3: find a craft, and don’t call it a hobby. The word ‘hobby’ is patronizing to your skills. Can you knit? You’re a craftsman. Do you play an instrument? You’re a musician. Do you paint? You’re an artist. Unfortunately, we too often tell ourselves that our ‘hobby’ is “just a thing we like to do at the weekend”. No it’s not. It’s your craft.
Project 4: the side hustle. The Jolt was born as a side hustle. We simply loved to write, with no aspiration beyond finding our voice. I now have a number of side hustles, and I nudge them forward on my terms, to my project timeline, which is as loosey-goosey as I need it to be. Each one is teaching me things about myself and the world, and making me realize how much more there is to learn about life. With a side hustle, the only person you report to is yourself.
Project 5: find an advisory board. There are countless start up’s and small companies desperate for your help. Being an advisor is incredibly rewarding; for both sides. Just like working for a non profit, never underestimate the value you can bring an organization that lacks what you have to offer. Whether you are compensated for your time in pay, equity or simply by what you learn, there are so many different ways to become an advisor, from an hour a month to joining an occasional meeting, even when your company may have rules around a second ‘job’.
Project 6: a fitness milestone that takes you out of your comfort zone. Running a marathon was a feat I never thought I could do. Trust me. I was the anti-athlete, far more comfortable staying in bed than getting out of it. But I could drag myself 3 miles. So I trained to run 5. Then 10. Then 20. Then 26.2. I’ve now added 10 triathlons to my list. My first ever run was just under a mile, in the snow, in London. Trust me when I say I ran like I was wearing a pair of steel sneakers with a bag of rusty nails in my lungs.
Project 7: become an expert. Collective wisdom says it takes about 10,000 hours of attention to a topic to become a world class expert. That’s about 417 days in total, or about 5 years for a 40 hour working week. It’s amazing how hours add up. But you don’t have to be the expert and reach 10,000 hours to gain expertise. The point is, expertise is built over time, and time will always reward you accordingly. In my experience, in the land of the blind, most of us are the one eyed kings in our worlds already, we just don’t know it. You may already be 5000 hours into a topic of expertise, but you may not have thought about it this way.
Project 8; your purpose. This is deliberately placed last. I find the desire of the self-help world to begin everything with “what’s my purpose?”, to be overwhelming in its magnitude of a question, and uninformed of your personal context and financial, emotional, and physical situation. Inevitably, the problem with starting here, is we spend more time ruminating on the question than doing things to help find the answer. How do you know what your purpose is until you’ve gone out and tried a few things? I didn’t. In my experience, purpose reveals itself through your lines of enquiry around the projects you choose, and not the other way round.
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These project ideas to develop a portfolio life are just the start. There are countless more.
What about a creative project?
A spiritual project?
A start-up project?
Think of all the things you’re doing in your life right now that could be reinvented as projects, as ways to build and diversify your life skills and experiences.
The potential is limitless.
I don’t mean that in a trite, Instagram meme kind of way, with a picture of a sunset and a soaring eagle.
I mean it in a totally possible and achievable way, with a picture of you, right in the center.
Because you’re probably on the path already.