It has long seemed to me that the notion of work-life balance is a misguided pursuit. Not because some balancing of those realities is neither possible nor desirable, but because the conjoined concept seems to create a false equality between work and life, and it isolates them from other crucial factors. Think about it, life is a far more important and multi-faceted concept than work. True, we place a significant value on our work and devote a great deal of time to it, but it is not on a par with life. Life is far bigger, right?
My antidote to the many discussions of work-life balance was often to present a Venn Diagram. In the late 1800s, a man named John Venn developed a visual to demonstrate relationships and proportionality. It became known as the Venn Diagram, perhaps a precursor to what would come to be known in our time as “info graphics”. A Venn Diagram is composed of labeled circles that represent the ways ideas or concepts relate to one another, where there is commonality or where there is separateness, and often the scale of the concept in relation to each other. My suggested alternative to the work-life balance conversation was to think about life as the largest circle and work as a subset circle that exists fully within it but is not nearly as large. Life, on the other hand, includes many other smaller circles in addition to work, circles equally as important and integral to the circle that is life — relationships, leisure, aspirations, pleasure, etc. A clearly constructed Venn Diagram does a nice job illustrating the idea, but there is an even better alternative now.
Christina Wallace is a Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurial Management at Harvard Business School and is an active startup mentor and angel investor. Her most recent book is The Portfolio Life, and from the moment I saw the cover I knew there was now a perfect replacement for the work-life balance duality. Wallace makes the case for looking at our identity through a far wider aperture, well beyond the merely two-dimensional aspect of work and life. She challenges us to think about our lives as a portfolio. That metaphor should appeal to all of us who have a passion for all things design and art. For a designer or writer or artist of any sort, a portfolio is a crucial concept, a curated collection of diverse yet integrated work that represents our ideal self. In her book, Wallace challenges us to think about our lives as our portfolio and to curate it the way a designer or artist would, weaving together the contents, selecting a variety and blend that is handsomely representative, deselecting those pieces which don’t quite measure up.
Thinking about our lives as a curated portfolio of components prompts us to think of ourselves as more than merely our work, as significant as the element of work can and should be. Wallace suggests that we not only integrate multiple elements in our portfolio life, but in fact actively seek to have a richly diverse and integrated set of concepts that comprise who we are. Her own life journey illustrates that unmistakably. She was, very briefly, a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group but began her career at the Metropolitan Opera. She studied piano and cello at Interlochen Arts Academy, graduated magna cum laude from Emory University with degrees in mathematics and theater studies, and then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Wallace spent a decade building businesses in fashion, media, and edtech, including a venture inside the American Museum of Natural History focused on getting more girls into coding and technology. She would characterize herself as a “multihyphenate,” a composite of what might appear disparate career paths and position titles, but that represent a carefully curated blend of elements that create her identity. Wallace would say that this should not be considered an aberration, but instead a highly desirable merging and balancing of richly diverse components. A portfolio life.
This way of thinking about our lives seems so much richer than merely seeking some equilibrium between two unequal variables, work and life. And it seems all the more important to think about a portfolio life for ourselves in this current period of uncertainty about the role of work, the variety of places where work can and/or should happen, and the work-in-progress that is the current setting for the overall rethinking of business and organizational definitions.
If we are rejecting the mission of achieving work-life balance and replacing it with embracing the act of creating a portfolio life, how do we make that happen. Christina Wallace’s book includes some interesting strategies for doing that, pursuing an assortment of pathways toward building a portfolio life. One of the most interesting is her recommendation to think about our lives from the perspective of a founding CEO. A founding CEO is fundamentally intent on building something, creating an entity with multiple dimensions that will come to life and grow, often exponentially.
Take a moment to think about your life from the perspective of a founding CEO. How will you define mission and purpose? Who will join you in the enterprise, and what capabilities and skills and gifts will need to be represented? Where will you seek advice and wisdom? What pathways will you seek and follow? How will you measure success? That’s just the start for building your portfolio life.
Finally, any designer or writer or artist would want their curated portfolio to represent their best self, their finest portrait of their vision, their capabilities, and their creations. Think about the component parts of your portfolio life, and think comprehensively and inclusively. Feels better than thinking about work-life balance, huh?