Christina Wallace
Guest is known for...
Christina Wallace is a faculty member at Harvard Business School, an entrepreneur, author and Broadway producer. She has built a career across business, technology and the arts, and is the author of The Portfolio Life, which explores how we can build lives that are not defined by a single professional identity. Christina’s work focuses on career design, identity, optionality and navigating the different seasons of life.
In this conversation, Christina introduces the idea of a Portfolio Life — a way of thinking about who we are and what we do that moves beyond the traditional notion of a linear career. She describes herself as a “human Venn diagram”, made up of different skills, interests, experiences, perspectives and passions, and explains why our identity should be broader than our current job title.
She then explores the four pillars of a Portfolio Life: identity, optionality, diversification and flexibility. The conversation looks at how we can recognise the different possibilities available to us, diversify what we invest our time and attention in, and consciously rebalance our portfolio as our needs and priorities change across different seasons of life.
Deepak and Christina also explore the idea of Explore and Exploit, how we can find talent-market fit over the course of our careers, and why we need to develop a personal scorecard rather than measuring success through metrics that are easy to track or defined by someone else. The conversation connects closely with Deepak’s idea of living a FLAVOUR-ful life, where different parts of who we are can receive different allocations of time and attention at different stages of life.
Published in October
Here's what I will learn...
- Why your identity is bigger than your current job, and how recognising the different skills, interests, experiences and perspectives you carry can create more possibilities.
- What the four pillars of a Portfolio Life are — identity, optionality, diversification and flexibility — and how they help you navigate career and life transitions.
- Why diversification does not mean doing more, and how to decide where to invest your time and attention based on the needs and priorities of the season you are in.
- How to think about your career as a series of chapters, using Explore and Exploit to experiment early, discover your strengths and eventually bring different parts of your experience together.
- How to create your own scorecard for success, rather than relying on easily measurable markers like money, promotions or status to define whether your life is working.
LISTEN TO THE FULL CONVERSATION
Download Full Podcast Transcript From the Podcast
Christina speaks about how she has zigged and zagged across her career across music, arts, Broadway, Startups, Academia and much more. She speaks about how she has kept a certain fluidity across her various pursuits and her identity!
Christina calls herself a human venn diagram where she is an intersection of many circles. She urges us to be broad about what the circles are – think skills, passions, hobbies, childhood pursuits, perspectives and much more!
Christina speaks about how the venn diagram is who we are and the portfolio is what we do! She also emphasizes how we need to design our portfolio in line with the seasons in our life.
Christina speaks about how we should communicate our competence as a package when we have a portfolio that includes many pursuits at a point in time and over time. The unidimensional approach of a ranking breaks down because we are playing in multiple playgrounds, not one.
Christina speaks about how we should think about pursuing one big thing or a portfolio. She brings it back to how we should reflect on what we want from life in the season we are in.
Christina makes the case for being patient with ourselves and not flaming out too early in the pursuit of glory in our 20s and 30s. She urges us to be patient and try a few experiences and combine them creatively to make them count at the back end of our journey.
Christina urges us to think about our portfolio along the lines of a financial portfolio. She urges us to look at our needs and goals given the season we are in do determine what to take on and at what intensity.
Christina speaks about the different types of portfolios that people can have. Moonlighters – pursuing one big thing and having another pursuit that you spend time on at night. Zig Zaggers – people that try different things at various points in time. Multi-hyphenates – people who are multi-talented and pursue many things in parallel.
Christina speaks about how we could prioritize across the various priorities in the different seasons in our life. She speaks about how 20s and 30s are often a time to experiment and sow seeds across a broad range of areas and then as life unfolds in 40s and 50s, we are able to bring various elements to bear and construct our portfolio.
Christina mentions that it is easy to measure one element of our life such as Financial Assets, number of promotions, Compensation, Health parameters and so on. But how does one take stock of the health of the portfolio as a whole?