Christina Wallace, a Harvard Business School lecturer and author of The Portfolio Life, explains how to treat your life like a diversified investment portfolio. She walks through three guiding questions (Who am I? What do I need? What do I want?) and an exercise called the 100 Wishes to help you allocate time across work, family, hobbies, and rest.
Chapters
Now to our series Life Lessons, talking about a work-life balance.
So if you're feeling like you're juggling a lot every day, our next guest may be able to help prioritize the things we enjoy doing. Christina Wallace is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of the book— it's called The Portfolio Life— and she joins us now to tell us more about it. Good morning to you.
Good morning.
This concept is so interesting. A lot of us obviously are trying to balance work and family, health, hobbies, but you have a strategy that can help us do it, and you say to approach it like You would a financial portfolio? What do you mean by that?
Yeah, I hate this phrase work-life balance. It makes it sound like work and life are in opposition to each other when in fact work is part of your life. So this model is based on a financial portfolio. You know, you allocate your investments across assets, stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, in order to meet the needs of your portfolio at that stage. And it's diversified. And it's the same idea with a portfolio life. So how are you allocating your time and your talents across your work, your hobbies, family, rest in a way that meets the needs for the stage of life you're in. And when your needs change, you rebalance your portfolio life.
And this is a look at a suggested portfolio balance right here. You, you know, you say a big part of living a well-balanced life is, is remembering that we're bigger than that job or we're bigger than that, that role. Why is that so, so important?
You are bigger than your job. And this is important for 2 reasons. Number one, You don't want to lose your job and your identity in the same conversation. And number 2, when you see yourself as bigger than how you currently monetize your time, it gives you space and permission to pivot, to go in a different direction if your life takes you there or if something happens, if there's a disruption to your career, your industry, you're not boxed in.
You say there are 3 questions you should ask yourself. What are those 3 questions and how do they help?
Who am I? What do I need? And what do I want? Pretty straightforward, right? But you start with who am I? And this is all of the things that you bring to the table. What are your skills, your talents, your networks, your curiosities? And these might be things that you have to excavate. Maybe you put them away as you grew up and tried to look serious and focused.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I call myself a human Venn diagram, and I would argue everyone else is too. So what all is in your Venn diagram? And then second, What do you need? And this could be straightforward, like how much income do you need? But this could be other things. I have a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old, and right now I need flexibility, autonomy, and an office with a door, 'cause sometimes I need an afternoon nap.
Right, right.
And then what do you want? And I mean this in the broadest sense. There's an exercise in the book called 100 Wishes where I tell you to grab a stack of Post-its and write down 100 wishes for your life. I love that. Which 100 is a lot, right? You gotta work at this. But the idea is that it's bigger than just career goals. It's what do you want? What do you want to look like? What experiences do you want? Who do you want to love? What imprint do you want to leave behind?
I love that.
So you take these 3 things— who you are, what you need, what you want— you design a portfolio that fits for this chapter.
What do you say— I feel like for a lot of people there's this constant tug of war between what you have to do and what you want to do. And some people are like, you know, I want to do this, I don't want to work, or I have to work and I don't want to work, you know what I mean? There's a, there's a constant tug of war.
I get it. But here's the thing. If you look at the things you have to do, I start by being really appreciative of what needs they meet, what they give you, right? Maybe that good enough job gives you stability, income, health insurance. Maybe it gives you the ability to do the things you want to do that might be a little riskier. Maybe those things can't support your whole life. And so it gives you that flexibility to take some risks. And risks are important. You want to take some chances. But as long as you're diversified, your portfolio will be okay.
And beyond that, Beyond taking risks, you contend that we need to fail and we need to practice failing.
Yes.
How does one go about practicing failure?
I know, the F-word, right? It's terrifying. But here's the thing. I define failure as any time things didn't turn out the way you wanted them to. Now, that could be because of something you did, but it could be because of something outside of your control. Either way, you failed. You've learned something about yourself or the world or both. And now you have new information to take forward. So you don't want to be afraid of failure.
I guess if you don't fail, you're not trying.
Exactly. And so the point here is to practice. Fail small in areas that don't actually matter that much to get comfortable with that feeling so that when that important risk comes on, that chance you want to take, you won't say no because of a fear.
It's a great book. I read it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you.
It was really very interesting. Thank you. It was so good. The Portfolio Life. It's out right now. We'll be right back.
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