Contact Christina Wallace
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3 Questions to ask yourself
When have you seen me happiest?
What do you come to me for?
Where do I stand our against my peers?
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Episode Transcript
The transcript is computer generated. There may be errors.
Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to how to live. A podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host Sharad Lal. This is episode 78. Do you ever feel like you're juggling too many passions? What if all your interests could come together, not just to earn money, but to fulfil your creative and personal needs. This is called portfolio life. And no, it's not about stocks and investments. It's about designing a life that balances everything you love. Our guest today is the perfect embodiment of this concept. Christina Wallace, serial entrepreneur and Whitey bestseller author,And the creator of the portfolio life. After working with BCG and founding multiple businesses. Christina discovered that her true passion lay at the intersection of business technology and the arts. She's crafted her own portfolio life. Which includes teaching at Harvard business school. Producing shows at Broadway. Writing bestsellers being a mother of two. And even singing in the choir. In today's episode, we'll explore what really is portfolio life?
How can we build it on our own? Why failure is a crucial part of success. how to plan and craft your ideal life. But before we dive in, thank you to all of you across one 40 countries for your incredible support. If you haven't already, please do follow us. now without further ado. Here's the remarkable Christina Wallace.
Sharad Lal: Hi, Christina. Welcome to the How to Live podcast. Good morning to you.
Christina Wallace: Good evening. Thank you so much for having me.
Sharad Lal: It's a pleasure. Whereabouts do we find you today?
Christina Wallace: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sharad: Early and bright. 9 a. m. for you, 9 p. m. for me.
Congratulations, Christina, on all the great work you're doing. You've written a fantastic book on portfolio living. You've put up a lot of content out there. There are many people who are familiar with the concept, but a few may not know exactly what this is. So maybe let's start right there.
What exactly is portfolio living?
Christina Wallace: I love that, portfolio living has become,enough of a concept in the world that we can have this conversation. Portfolio career was the first phrase that took off, a portfolio life takes that same concept and just Acknowledges the reality that your career is in the context of your life.
So all of these other things like family, creativity, health, and volunteering work, and the community that you want to be part of all of these things, make up the fabric of your life. your work is a big part of that certainly is for me, but.
It's not all of my life. as you are designing different chapters of your life, it gives you permission to rebalance your portfolio for what you need at that chapter, right? We think about this from a financial point of view, and it's quite obvious that the makeup of your financial portfolio will change for different chapters of your life based on the risk and reward and liquidity that you might face.
We don't often have that same willingness to make a dramatic rebalancing in our own lives, even though we go through very distinct chapters where our needs dramatically change. it is the naming of something that already is true, but it's also by naming it the permission to really think about your life holistically.
to design intentionally how the components all fit together in your portfolio for the current chapter of life you're in.
Sharad: very fascinating concept. What got you interested in exploring something like this?
Christina Wallace: I not so jokingly say I wrote this book to explain to my mother what I've been doing with my life. because I have been doing this my entire life. I talk in the book how I had this deep love and training in classical music and in maths. All the way growing up, I got to college where I double majored in maths and theatre and then triple minored in music, physics and political science.
There were so many things that I loved and I didn't want to choose 1 and put everything else away. So to the best of my ability, I just kept finding ways not just to pursue all of them, but to mash up the intersections of them. I remember directing a play by David Auburn called Proof that's literally about a mathematician at the University of Chicago.
So I was like, aha, these things can intersect. And then when I got out in the world and I had my first jobs, I worked in the arts and artists are also a natural user of portfolios because of the financial instability of that career, you're constantly thinking about, what are maybe the stable sources, like a bartending job or an assistant at an office that can, allow me to take more risk in the creative side.
so I started doing this myself and then when I got to business school and I was able to study all of the maths and the financial theory behind this, I was like, Oh, there's actually an entire model for this.
and there are frameworks for how you think about literally the construction, the design of your portfolio. This is genius. So in some ways, I stumbled on the tools to match what I was already doing. But the real unlock for me is when I had a podcast for many years called the limit does not exist, where my cohost and I went out interviewing a whole bunch of other people who had done similar things to us.
And the listeners just kept writing in saying, I do this too, right? it was that moment where you think like. How many of us out there both want this and are doing this
And that was the moment when I realised there was a community who could really benefit from this. If I wrote a book, I might get some scale on these ideas.
Sharad: to clarify for listeners, we don't have one job, but we have multiple. jobs that pay us income and also look at our interests. And we balance it with, Hey, we can take risk in one area, but one of the areas is stable. That's how we manage the whole portfolio, the way that we work.
And that's part of life.
Christina Wallace: Yeah. Cause it fundamentally starts with what do you need for this chapter of life? How much money do you need? How much flexibility are you getting your creative needs met? Are you Saying, how am I going to meet those needs?
Maybe you've got a great, good enough job. We love those that meet your financial needs, meet your health insurance needs if you're here in the US. but maybe not. Give you the opportunity to be as creative or don't offer the growth that you're looking for, but you don't want to throw the whole thing away.
You're happy with it. So that means in your portfolio, you need to find a way to address those creativity, those growth needs. So this could be a hobby. you don't have to monetize that hobby.
That hobby can purely be something that you love. You might find, as some folks in the book that I profile did, there becomes a tipping point in their life, where they realise. They wanna make the hobby, the job, and because they've been laying the groundwork, they have the network, the expertise at this point, it's not like an overnight, oh I have to completely reinvent myself.
no. The hobby's gonna become how I get paid and meet those needs, maybe a little extra support. it gives you that fluidity and that flexibility to say, what are all the pieces of who I am?
I talk a lot about human Venn diagrams. What are all the things that make me, and then how do they show up in my portfolio? AndThe world is changing so fast. Technology is changing so fast.
This is a completely different world for career building.
Sharad: such a good way to look at life and careers. you've also described yourself, even in Wikipedia and other places as a human Venn diagram you talked about. If you can talk a little bit more about that,
Christina Wallace: So this comes out of,the first principle as I codified them down in a portfolio life is that your identity is not your job title, if your identity is your job, then it can be taken away from you. You can lose it in a downsizing or, when your company fails and you're the CEO, suddenly you're a nobody, right?
There has to be this separation from who you are and what you do, which is hard because for anyone who's ambitious and certainly in a culture like we have in the United States, where you lead with your job in any dinner party or networking introduction, It can be really hard to see those as separate.
so years ago when I was trying to first figure out how to introduce myself, how to describe who I am and not just what I do.
Then one night, I just said, you know what? I'm a human Venn diagram. And the person I was speaking with this investor just paused and he goes, Oh. You're interdisciplinary. Okay, tell me more. So I've kept this up ever since, 10, 12 years, I've been going on where that's how I introduced myself. It's the line in my bio. I'm a human Venn diagram. And I have built a life, a career at the intersection. Of business technology in the arts and once you use that framework for identity I would argue everyone is a human Venn diagram.
You might be using a piece of your red diagram today in your portfolio, and when you want to make changes, you have all these other parts of you that you could bring to bear just because they're not in use today. Doesn't mean they're gone forever.
Sharad: I think that this is a much richer understanding of who we are and who everyone else is, right? This is one of my favourite questions to ask when I hire someone. What's in your Venn diagram? Tell me who you are beyond just this role that you are currently stepping into. How did you discover what your human Venn diagram is?
Christina Wallace: In part, it was looking backward and trying to make sense of the choices I had made. in theatre we often think about, What is in character? What is out of character? and by definition in a play, if a character does something. It's in character.
And if it feels. it's out of character. That means your understanding of the character is incorrect. So you have to understand, like, why and how would they make these choices? What is it that drives this? I took that same lens and applied it to myself and said, okay, you are someone who, Did research on colloidal particles and sent specimens off to space to have the experiment run in zero gravity.
You are someone who writes music, performs regularly and directs and produces plays. You are someone who has a maths tattoo. All of these things are true. If this is all in character for who I am, then What are the threads that make the choices I've made?
Makes sense. And I realised whether it was working at the Metropolitan Opera or going to Harvard Business School if I tried to categorise them, I started to see, oh, Arts management is the intersection of arts and business and tech startups are the intersection of business and technology and some of the really cool 3D interactive kinetic sculptures and things that I've been at a privilege of advising and be part of are the intersection of art and technology you start realising that the Venn diagram offers not just that I live in these worlds, but that these worlds regularly intersect.
Sharad: And mashup. it's those intersections that you actually find a lot of opportunity to create the future. Lovely. And how does that Venn diagram then evolve with time as you're growing? How does that happen?
Christina Wallace: Certainly the simplification of my Venn diagram are those three industries, but I also have certainly changed over time. Being a mother and a wife is now part of that Venn diagram. It shows up deeply in who I am and how I inform, what I offer in a room when I step in.
But I also have other components like storytelling, which isn't really an industry. It's just a skill, but it's also a point of view. It's how I communicate and it's how I understand things. that, again, intersects with all these other pieces. So it certainly can evolve over time.
I think if you were to go back and actually excavate your childhood, who you were before you started editing yourself, I think a lot of these things, like you can go back and find artefacts. Of all of this in who you were when you were 10, as you experience the world and more of it, that might have expanded it.
I'm an adventurer. I'm a traveller that certainly didn't show up until I was in my 20s and had the money to do that. I think the portfolio changes with every season of life, but I think your Venn diagram Is much more stable and what changes is which parts of that Venn diagram get put to use.
For example, when I left the Metropolitan Opera to go to business school, I left my employment in the arts for what I thought might be forever. I wasn't sure. Then I had an opportunity. That sort of came out of left field to become part of the producing team for a Broadway musical. And suddenly that piece of me gets reactivated in a way that I never saw coming, but was absolutely the right thing at the right time. And now that's a big part of why work. I'm a professor, I'm an author, I'm a startup advisor, but I'm also a Broadway producer. it just was a piece of me that took a backseat for a little bit.
And now it comes back into my portfolio.
Sharad: So Christina, like you said, you were in consulting and then of course you were an entrepreneur how did that decision happen? Hey, I'm not going to go after a new job, but I'm going to do this thing called portfolio life, where I'm going to have these many interests.
Christina Wallace: In part, I think it's because that year in consulting, I struggled to describe that year properly because I love working at BCG. I loved everyone I worked with. These are the smartest people I've probably ever had the chance to interact with. I loved a lot of the questions we were being asked and the challenges that were put forth.
So the content of the job wasn't The mismatch for me, but it was the context. It was the fact that in client services, especially in a top management consulting firm like BCG, you have no control over your schedule. You can't join a choir that rehearses on Tuesday nights because you're on the road Monday to Thursday.
And I realised when I am in control of my schedule, then I can put the pieces of my portfolio in my week in a way that meets my needs.
And when I'm not in control of my schedule, like I wasn't for that year, I have these needs that can't be met and it was really frustrating to me.
and at the same time, a lot of the things that I had learned producing theatre, making art, making music. was relevant to and consistent with the world of entrepreneurship,
Like it's not perfect. You don't have everything you need and you have to get it out there and see how people react. You get that first user that says, I hate it. Or that first audience member that doesn't laugh at the joke. And you're like, okay, that hurt my ego, but now I have new information. Let's go back and reiterate.
so I saw so much of what I had already been doing and that I loved doing could be applied in this whole other space that was growing. It was hot. There was lots of funding and resources and support for this world. I thought, Let's see, what's the worst thing I can do? Fail? and I did fail the first one.
Total failure. and then I survived the failure, which is an incredibly powerful thing to survive the worst thing that you can imagine happening.
Sharad: What do you define as surviving? The failure?
Christina Wallace: I got through. So I don't come from family money. I don't have a ton of resources. I come from a working class family. I didn't have a partner of any kind. So no other income to keep me afloat. and I had a ton of student loans.
But I pulled it off. I rented a sofa in someone's living room for 100 bucks a week, and I ate pizza as my only meal of the day sometimes, then we raised venture capital and we were able to pay ourselves a salary, which wasn't very much, but it was enough to get my needs met. Long story short, when the whole thing failed and we ended up shutting down, I was broke.
I can't even move home because my family has downsized since I left home. And in that moment, I was like, okay, you don't get to wallow. Let's get moving. And I used that opportunity, especially because I was so completely just destroyed.
I had never failed at anything. There's no other way to spin it if we fail. I think the great joy of that is that I could just go out to the people who loved me and knew me, my network. I didn't have to spend the time spinning it. I could just say I need your help.
I have to both put my. my self perception back together and I need to find a job that will pay me enough to afford my life in 30 days. This is a burning bridge, and it made me do things I probably wouldn't have had the guts to do otherwise. I emailed 70 of the people in my network and asked them to get coffee, and crucially to pay for the coffee because I couldn't pay for the coffee.
and in those coffee chats, I asked them 3 questions. I said,When have you seen me happiest? In part because I can't remember being happy. I'm so sad right now. What do you come to me for? What's that moment where you think, I should see what Christina has to say about this.
Where do I stand out against my peers? And I took all of this data. 70 coffee chats was far too much coffee, by the way. but I took all of those answers and was able to construct a version of who I was and what I had to offer the world in a moment where I couldn't see myself.
in doing so, it actually pulled out some things that I had not seen. About myself that I thrive in the zero to one, like that uncertainty of how do we start something? that I love storytelling. I love to find the narrative. So people would come to me when they were.
On a job search when they were making a pivot, or when they were launching a product and trying to figure out what's our positioning there was a piece of that that really stuck out to folks that I had never really identified and so coming out of that. That dark night of the soul with a quite clear burning boat.
I can't emphasise that enough. If I had the luxury of wallowing for six months, I would have, and you don't learn anything new
I thinkThat's really powerful, and if you haven't experienced failure, I think the longer you get without experiencing it, the scarier it can be.
Sharad: I love what you've even written about failure. I think you could have a book on failure as well. There were such powerful things. And when I was reading the book, these three questions that you asked, Ithought, what wonderful questions. as you're talking about even your human Venn diagram, this helped you clarify your human Venn diagram.
And you got those three beautiful questions. Now, once you got clarity on the various areas of your life, how did you then proceed towards creating the portfolio life?
Christina Wallace: It wasn't great . Now I have a job and now let's put all the pieces back in. I've gone through these iterations where the portfolio gets too full. even though each individual thing brings me joy. Collectively, the portfolio brings me stress, and so I had this moment in 2016, where I just had too many things, all of them good, but collectively just overwhelming. I was a columnist at Forbes at the time and I just documented a day. I was like, I get up and I advise these people. I go to that workout. I have my day job over lunch. I review the fundraising plans for the nonprofit board. I sit on, and then I studied my music, on the subway down to my computer science class, where I also am like double checking my emails for other things, and I finished by eating dinner at 11 o'clock at night, which is a bowl of cereal, while standing in my kitchen, and I got a bunch of Messages from my friends, from my family being like, are you okay?
This doesn't sound sustainable. And I was like, Oh, I am a little stressed. and I have had these moments where, you know, you learn. What the right portfolio is when you get to the friction of it, not working.
so part of this methodology. is also the discipline to weed out, to rebalance, right? It's the question of prioritisation of what belongs in my portfolio for this season and what's going to take a back seat.
I almost think about it like a sound mixing board, right? Where you've got all these channels, of different instruments and different things. And. If they're all in the mix, it's cacophony. so you have these choices you have to make when you're making music, where you put some of them up, maybe 70 percent or 30 percent or 20%.
And then some just have to go to zero for a while. And in that moment, I was like, Oh, the power. The portfolio is also what you say no to, to make space for the things you need to say yes to, and collectively ensuring not just that you have all the things, but you also have rest. You have free time.
Sharad: Yeah, that sparks a few thoughts and a few things. One, I like the fact where you said that you put some of the activities to zero. You don't put it at 5 percent because if you put it at 5%, your mind space still has those six, seven things. So you have to just take it out for the season. I love that. I also like that capacity where of course there's a discipline to making sure you have time for rest and stuff.
I guess the issue is there are peaks and troughs, so you might have that 60-70 percent capacity, but in the month you've suddenly got many things and the problem that happens. But that's life. I guess that's stuff that you have to deal with.
Christina Wallace: it is, but it's also something you can't foresee perfectly. But for example, I know when the peaks are in my academic calendar. I know exactly when the beginning of the semester will be when finals will come when grades are due. I know what that pattern of my year looks like for my day job. So when I'm signing up for.
Other things in my portfolioI would be quite remiss if I chose something that is going to also peak. in line with the peaks that I'm already aware of. So this is where the design piece is really an intentional word because I can look out and say, okay, here are the crunch periods in this part of my life.
Let's counter program those crunch periods with the design. The rest periods and some of my other things. Let's make sure I say yes to a vacation before this crazy period. Let's make sure that the performances don't demand something of me at the same time as grades are due. and crucially my husband also has a portfolio life.
We do this as a family. we look at his schedule and our children's school schedule and the days that the teachers are doing professional development, which means we have no child care. We do this at a COO level planning for our family. it gives us the bones and the visibility into, hey, we're about to enter a really crazy 3 weeks.
Let's give each other the grace of knowing we're all going to be a little bit. At our wits end and let's make sure that we put some downtime in at the end of those 3 weeks to allow the recovery.
Sharad: How does that planning happen at an individual level as well as at a family level? How do you do
Christina Wallace: Yeah, at an individual level. I have a Gantt chart, straight up. I love my consulting Gantt charts and,
Sharad: B, C, G, they do the charts very well.
Christina Wallace: They taught me. so I do literally like a month by month Gantt chart. I look at my year ahead and I live my life at the beginning of the year, September, and the end of it is August and I map out, just on a month by month basis, at the big level.
What are the big, Notable things this month, whether it's a deliverable or a big due date or a, maybe a special, teaching thing that I've signed up for? I kind of mark all of those in and then I look at the other components.
We do this ahead of time, because the downside to a portfolio is if you diversify well, if you counter-program your peaks and troughs well, you will never officially have downtime.
Sharad: Yeah.
Christina Wallace: So knowing that's a flaw of the system, you then just have to schedule downtime as though it's one of your, and this is particularly true again, if you have a partner who also is doing work like this. so I put together my pieces and
We have an agreement within our family that only 1 of us gets to write a book at any given time.
we can't both be giving weekends over to deep writing, because that's also when we spend time with our family. So it becomes a little bit like one of us Gets to be the primary parent for a few months while the other one gets some protected time on the weekends and then we swap and we make sure as we check in with each other.
Do we feel like on any given day? It's not equal by any mean, but do we feel like on balance
Hmm.that it has worked out to feeling equal that you're giving as much as you're getting? and that doesn't feel mismatched in the relationship.
Sharad: And as you're planning this, it struck me like you've got one core kind of job. So like for you, it's teaching with Harvard entrepreneurship and, and your husband has this thing. So does that normally help? Because then you can plan through the pattern, have other things fit around it.
Christina Wallace: yeah, it can help, right? It's certainly useful if there is n't a full time job, but if there's a piece that is a little more predictable, or you have a longer visibility into the line of sight, then it's easier to take on other things that have less visibility.
so that's also how you think about diversification. and designing this portfolio, are there pieces that can offer some stability and visibility. That allows you to have other pieces that have less visibility, less predictability. if everything is. Up in the air, it can feel overwhelming and if everything is stable, it can feel boring.
Sharad: Yeah.
So how can you find that, that mix as you're putting this together, that offers you. Stability and also movement. As you've been trying this over different periods of time, what has been one really surprising thing you've not even written about that's come about? Yeah.
Christina Wallace: I think that the era of entering parenthood was just something that I knew would require a completely different approach to this. it's not just about parenthood in general.
Who are your children? Some children have special needs. Some children are colicky as my second one was, and the whole first year of life, you're in survival mode. If you have a partner, what kind of parent are they? All of this is impossible to plan for. So I think,entering the 1st, 2 years of becoming a parent, Required a lot more grace with myself. I felt like I was failing at my portfolio life because all I was doing was parenting, working and trying to sleep, but not actually getting any sleep. I was like, I'm not making anything. I'm not performing. all my creativity is gone.
I realised that, for that season, I had needs. I was taking care of myself to the best of my ability. I was taking care of my family to the best of my ability. And I was taking care of my marriage to the best of my ability and everything else just had to go to 0%.
and I assume there will be more seasons of life like this, where there are some changes that are. Smaller transitions. And then there are some that are like back to the drawing board. now that I know that it gives me a little bit more,
Sharad: grace to say okay, we're going to go to zero. It's almost like zero based budgeting. You take everything out. There are no assumptions. And we rebuild for what this season has to be. Very interesting. I went through something very similar as well. Two under two takes a lot of pressure and there's some things which are much more important than, The way you've designed your life and it's okay for that season for those two, three years to give time to it.
And then you can come back to designing it the way you want it, but then also prepares you that these seasons will come again
Christina Wallace: And that's why I love the term season and not just chapter because seasons come back, right? Like you get another chance at fall. and I think that's the part that I. Struggled to remember at the beginning. I was like, this is not the new normal forever. This is just for this season.
but I think also I struggled personally as a woman who's always been very ambitious and always been very career focused with the voices in my head that said, Is it true that once you have kids and you're a mom, like you no longer care about your job. Like I've always said it's not true, but I wasn't a mom.I I really hated for a minute. My priority was my children. It sounds crazy to say out loud, but I felt like I was letting down all of feminism. And then I had a moment in the middle of the night, when I realised that I am still ambitious. But my ambition is now expressed in more ways than just my work.
And that part of my ambition is In setting up the relationship I have with my children is I really want them to still like me when they're grownups,I want us to have this long, productive, beautiful relationship and that starts with how we lay the groundwork when we're first getting to know each other, right?
As kids and parents. I have an ambition that my marriage will not just become roommates who are trading off on a list of tasks during this era of parenting. To do that, I have to invest a lot of work as we go through this transition. and it's okay if that means that ambition is being directed in these other planes. That means there might be a little bit less directed. In the work plane or in some of these other hobby planes for a while, I didn't lose it. It's just being repurposed.
Sharad: I love that. I love that. So it's like your core skill is not going away. It's just directing itself in a different way. And you did the storytelling for yourself to clarify for yourself. That's the way it's going to go.
Christina Wallace: I love that. You said that because so much of this are the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves
Sharad: Yes.
Christina Wallace: can either hold us back or give us the permission to do what needs to be done.
Sharad: storytelling,it's an iterative process.
Sometimes you may have come up with something which may not have been authentic. And that's the thing about storytelling because It's very subjective. If the story is not authentic at some stage, it will not hold true. And you'll have to change the story. That's the path of getting to the true story that sits and is empowering. So as we talk about portfolio life, of course, we've talked about interest. What about the money component?
Christina Wallace: Yeah.
Sharad: money as a family. How does that come in and how do we make sure that also is taken care of?
Christina Wallace: What I think, Is so empowering about a portfolio from a money perspective, a couple of things. Number one,your money needs don't have to be met by the same part of your portfolio as your growth needs, your community needs
You can see this in places where.people want to make these shifts where you say, what was a hobby can now become the thing that supports you andHow you made your money now can downshift as you go through these different chapters. That's powerful in a world where layoffs could occur, where technology might make a piece of your portfolio redundant. Having that diversity of skills and networks and industries allows you to decide which piece gets monetized as you go through these transitions.
You're not stuck at a dead end if your main source of money suddenly disappears. Goes poof.then there's a piece that says you don't have to make all your money from one. Piece of the portfolio. I'm a writer and a speaker and a teacher and that's a very common form of monetization through multiple lines of very related work.
but separate income streams, because being a writer and a speaker and a teacher individually, none of them pay enough to cover a mortgage in Cambridge. But collectively. It works. it's the creativity to step away from. I'm getting my money from one job. That job will be consistent over time and it will be enough.
Sharad: It will always be enough to cover the season of life. I'm in. And if I can't do that, then I have failed. Right, that's the narrative that our parents operated under certainly that of our grandparents and because it was true. Then it's just not true anymore. Absolutely. In your book, you've got so many interesting practical exercises, and you talked about one of those three questions. Are there any other exercises that come to mind which people have played back to you and said, this was so good? Maybe you can share it with the listeners.
Christina Wallace: sure. So the 1st kind of series of steps that I have you walk through is figuring out what's in your Venn diagram.
And this is where you can go and ask those questions and get the input from other folks. Then the next step is to get a sense of what's in your portfolio. We all have a de facto portfolio. It might be 90 percent allocated to work, but it is a portfolio. And as part of that, there's a couple of exercises.
The 1st is figuring out what you need. And this can take a little bit. Like I need an office with a door that closes.
Sharad: I'm in it right now.
you said that and I said I need that . I
Christina Wallace: I need that. And I didn't realise how much I needed that until the pandemic. When I was stuck at home working with my husband who has this insane phone voice and his work is talking to people and my work is thinking, and those two jobs do not work as
Co-working spaces. So being able to identify those needs, step one, really giving yourself permission, like non judgmentally, what do I need? But then the next step is what do I wish for? And I love this. I did not invent this exercise. I borrowed it from a friend who blogged about it. But it's forcing yourself to come up with a hundred wishes for your life.
And I love the term wish rather than goal. Because a goal can easily fit into an achievement mindset.
I have wishes
Like my children, I want them to play a part in my life. I want to be able to pick up my grandkids when I'm 90. and these are things that I want to be true for my future life. And then that allows you to back solve for, okay, so what do I need to start doing to ensure that wish can come true?
I want to pick up my grandkids when I'm 90. I better start. lifting weights when I'm 40, right? there are things that you have to invest in if you want it to be true. The same as having a great relationship with my kids. So I love this because a hundred wishes is a lot.
Sharad: Most people can write like 20 are gonna take some work.
Christina Wallace: It's gonna take some work. you can't just do it in one stint. sometimes you can get to 35, you start thinking beyond just your job.
For a wonderful example of this, my mother in law, Had this incredible career. She was trained as a lawyer. She worked as an executive in real estate for many years, and then shifted to social impact. Just incredible, like retired at the top of her game. And then I'm not dead yet.
What am I going to do? She had literally studied art history in Spanish in college and hadn't really done anything with it
so now in This post retirement chapter, she's training as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Sharad: Wow.
Christina Wallace: where she can give tours and be a part of that world and connect with the curators and crucially use her Spanish as we have multilingual tourists coming through New York.
Sharad: Such a great story. Christina,
When we, as we set up trying things in our portfolio, we are bound to fail and you've called that out and many of us fail in other things. I love what you've written about failure.
If you can give us your take on
Christina Wallace: yes. So failure is 2 things. The definition for me is when you thought something would happen and it didn't, right? So there's you see this in experimentation in the sciences, We had a hypothesis. We ran the experiment. It didn't turn out, arguably, that it was a failed experiment, but we don't attach.
morality to that when we think about it from science or from entrepreneurship, even point of view. And yet somehow it feels like a bit of a moral judgement when we fail, so part of it is separating out the judgement piece and just acknowledging that failure if you thought something would happen.
It didn't. It could have been your fault. Might not have been, then the second piece of it, You have to take risk in a portfolio if you want reward. If you play it safe, right?
That's actually a terrible thing. Route you never have the opportunity to really have one of these like breakout moments. so if you're playing it safe in your own life, you are capping your upsideand quite potentially. Putting yourself at risk, so failure, giving yourself permission to try things that might not work is what allows you to take some risks, which can give you the opportunity for some really big outcomes.And doesn't mean you risk your entire portfolio.
if you allow yourself stability in some ways. then you intentionally go and take some risks in other ways, the correlation of these things allows this where the portfolio can protect you. And that's where I focus so much as I'm raising my kids.
I'm like, how do I get them to be unafraid of failure and be willing to lean into I'm scared and I can do it. Let's see what happens. How are you doing it with your kids? Literally, we've made this a family motto. I'm scared and I can do it. we don't negate the anxiety, the fear. We don't, it's still there. It's still there for me too. and it's not a but. It's an and right. This is straight from my improv comedy training. Yes. We acknowledge I'm scared and I can do it.
We say it out loud. The four year old before she goes off to summer camp. She says, I'm feeling scared. I'm feeling a little nervous.And she says, I'm scared and I can do it. And then she goes off to camp. Very powerful. I'm going to try that out. I literally have now said it to myself on a couple of occasions.
Sharad: going to try it out for my kids and myself. Christina, thank you very much. But before we wrap up, if there's one piece of bottom line advice you'd like to leave listeners in about portfolio life, what would that be?
You are so much more than how you monetize your time. You contain multitudes. figure out what all is in there and give yourself permission to let it out. Thank you very much, Christina, for spending an hour with us on this podcast. Thank you very much. I'm sure. Everyone's going to love the wisdom that you have to share, and wish you all the very best.
Christina Wallace: Thank you so much. Great to talk to you.
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Sharad Lal: Thank you, Christina, for such an insightful conversation. For more on Christina, please check the show notes. Here's something all of us could try. To understand our own diagram. Let's ask close friends, work, colleagues, mentors, teachers, these three questions. What am I great at? What do you come to me for? What do I do better than most people? Now, if you haven't noted these questions down, don't worry. They'll be in the episode description and the show notes. I planned to do this exercise myself. So if some of you hear from me, please oblige. Best of luck as you figure out your Venn diagram. This is the key to setting up a portfolio life. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The next episode will drop two weeks from now on October 22nd. Do join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead.
Bye bye.
Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to how to live. A podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host Sharad Lal. This is episode 78. Do you ever feel like you're juggling too many passions? What if all your interests could come together, not just to earn money, but to fulfil your creative and personal needs. This is called portfolio life. And no, it's not about stocks and investments. It's about designing a life that balances everything you love. Our guest today is the perfect embodiment of this concept. Christina Wallace, serial entrepreneur and Whitey bestseller author,And the creator of the portfolio life. After working with BCG and founding multiple businesses. Christina discovered that her true passion lay at the intersection of business technology and the arts. She's crafted her own portfolio life. Which includes teaching at Harvard business school. Producing shows at Broadway. Writing bestsellers being a mother of two. And even singing in the choir. In today's episode, we'll explore what really is portfolio life?
How can we build it on our own? Why failure is a crucial part of success. how to plan and craft your ideal life. But before we dive in, thank you to all of you across one 40 countries for your incredible support. If you haven't already, please do follow us. now without further ado. Here's the remarkable Christina Wallace.
Sharad Lal: Hi, Christina. Welcome to the How to Live podcast. Good morning to you.
Christina Wallace: Good evening. Thank you so much for having me.
Sharad Lal: It's a pleasure. Whereabouts do we find you today?
Christina Wallace: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sharad: Early and bright. 9 a. m. for you, 9 p. m. for me.
Congratulations, Christina, on all the great work you're doing. You've written a fantastic book on portfolio living. You've put up a lot of content out there. There are many people who are familiar with the concept, but a few may not know exactly what this is. So maybe let's start right there.
What exactly is portfolio living?
Christina Wallace: I love that, portfolio living has become,enough of a concept in the world that we can have this conversation. Portfolio career was the first phrase that took off, a portfolio life takes that same concept and just Acknowledges the reality that your career is in the context of your life.
So all of these other things like family, creativity, health, and volunteering work, and the community that you want to be part of all of these things, make up the fabric of your life. your work is a big part of that certainly is for me, but.
It's not all of my life. as you are designing different chapters of your life, it gives you permission to rebalance your portfolio for what you need at that chapter, right? We think about this from a financial point of view, and it's quite obvious that the makeup of your financial portfolio will change for different chapters of your life based on the risk and reward and liquidity that you might face.
We don't often have that same willingness to make a dramatic rebalancing in our own lives, even though we go through very distinct chapters where our needs dramatically change. it is the naming of something that already is true, but it's also by naming it the permission to really think about your life holistically.
to design intentionally how the components all fit together in your portfolio for the current chapter of life you're in.
Sharad: very fascinating concept. What got you interested in exploring something like this?
Christina Wallace: I not so jokingly say I wrote this book to explain to my mother what I've been doing with my life. because I have been doing this my entire life. I talk in the book how I had this deep love and training in classical music and in maths. All the way growing up, I got to college where I double majored in maths and theatre and then triple minored in music, physics and political science.
There were so many things that I loved and I didn't want to choose 1 and put everything else away. So to the best of my ability, I just kept finding ways not just to pursue all of them, but to mash up the intersections of them. I remember directing a play by David Auburn called Proof that's literally about a mathematician at the University of Chicago.
So I was like, aha, these things can intersect. And then when I got out in the world and I had my first jobs, I worked in the arts and artists are also a natural user of portfolios because of the financial instability of that career, you're constantly thinking about, what are maybe the stable sources, like a bartending job or an assistant at an office that can, allow me to take more risk in the creative side.
so I started doing this myself and then when I got to business school and I was able to study all of the maths and the financial theory behind this, I was like, Oh, there's actually an entire model for this.
and there are frameworks for how you think about literally the construction, the design of your portfolio. This is genius. So in some ways, I stumbled on the tools to match what I was already doing. But the real unlock for me is when I had a podcast for many years called the limit does not exist, where my cohost and I went out interviewing a whole bunch of other people who had done similar things to us.
And the listeners just kept writing in saying, I do this too, right? it was that moment where you think like. How many of us out there both want this and are doing this
And that was the moment when I realised there was a community who could really benefit from this. If I wrote a book, I might get some scale on these ideas.
Sharad: to clarify for listeners, we don't have one job, but we have multiple. jobs that pay us income and also look at our interests. And we balance it with, Hey, we can take risk in one area, but one of the areas is stable. That's how we manage the whole portfolio, the way that we work.
And that's part of life.
Christina Wallace: Yeah. Cause it fundamentally starts with what do you need for this chapter of life? How much money do you need? How much flexibility are you getting your creative needs met? Are you Saying, how am I going to meet those needs?
Maybe you've got a great, good enough job. We love those that meet your financial needs, meet your health insurance needs if you're here in the US. but maybe not. Give you the opportunity to be as creative or don't offer the growth that you're looking for, but you don't want to throw the whole thing away.
You're happy with it. So that means in your portfolio, you need to find a way to address those creativity, those growth needs. So this could be a hobby. you don't have to monetize that hobby.
That hobby can purely be something that you love. You might find, as some folks in the book that I profile did, there becomes a tipping point in their life, where they realise. They wanna make the hobby, the job, and because they've been laying the groundwork, they have the network, the expertise at this point, it's not like an overnight, oh I have to completely reinvent myself.
no. The hobby's gonna become how I get paid and meet those needs, maybe a little extra support. it gives you that fluidity and that flexibility to say, what are all the pieces of who I am?
I talk a lot about human Venn diagrams. What are all the things that make me, and then how do they show up in my portfolio? AndThe world is changing so fast. Technology is changing so fast.
This is a completely different world for career building.
Sharad: such a good way to look at life and careers. you've also described yourself, even in Wikipedia and other places as a human Venn diagram you talked about. If you can talk a little bit more about that,
Christina Wallace: So this comes out of,the first principle as I codified them down in a portfolio life is that your identity is not your job title, if your identity is your job, then it can be taken away from you. You can lose it in a downsizing or, when your company fails and you're the CEO, suddenly you're a nobody, right?
There has to be this separation from who you are and what you do, which is hard because for anyone who's ambitious and certainly in a culture like we have in the United States, where you lead with your job in any dinner party or networking introduction, It can be really hard to see those as separate.
so years ago when I was trying to first figure out how to introduce myself, how to describe who I am and not just what I do.
Then one night, I just said, you know what? I'm a human Venn diagram. And the person I was speaking with this investor just paused and he goes, Oh. You're interdisciplinary. Okay, tell me more. So I've kept this up ever since, 10, 12 years, I've been going on where that's how I introduced myself. It's the line in my bio. I'm a human Venn diagram. And I have built a life, a career at the intersection. Of business technology in the arts and once you use that framework for identity I would argue everyone is a human Venn diagram.
You might be using a piece of your red diagram today in your portfolio, and when you want to make changes, you have all these other parts of you that you could bring to bear just because they're not in use today. Doesn't mean they're gone forever.
Sharad: I think that this is a much richer understanding of who we are and who everyone else is, right? This is one of my favourite questions to ask when I hire someone. What's in your Venn diagram? Tell me who you are beyond just this role that you are currently stepping into. How did you discover what your human Venn diagram is?
Christina Wallace: In part, it was looking backward and trying to make sense of the choices I had made. in theatre we often think about, What is in character? What is out of character? and by definition in a play, if a character does something. It's in character.
And if it feels. it's out of character. That means your understanding of the character is incorrect. So you have to understand, like, why and how would they make these choices? What is it that drives this? I took that same lens and applied it to myself and said, okay, you are someone who, Did research on colloidal particles and sent specimens off to space to have the experiment run in zero gravity.
You are someone who writes music, performs regularly and directs and produces plays. You are someone who has a maths tattoo. All of these things are true. If this is all in character for who I am, then What are the threads that make the choices I've made?
Makes sense. And I realised whether it was working at the Metropolitan Opera or going to Harvard Business School if I tried to categorise them, I started to see, oh, Arts management is the intersection of arts and business and tech startups are the intersection of business and technology and some of the really cool 3D interactive kinetic sculptures and things that I've been at a privilege of advising and be part of are the intersection of art and technology you start realising that the Venn diagram offers not just that I live in these worlds, but that these worlds regularly intersect.
Sharad: And mashup. it's those intersections that you actually find a lot of opportunity to create the future. Lovely. And how does that Venn diagram then evolve with time as you're growing? How does that happen?
Christina Wallace: Certainly the simplification of my Venn diagram are those three industries, but I also have certainly changed over time. Being a mother and a wife is now part of that Venn diagram. It shows up deeply in who I am and how I inform, what I offer in a room when I step in.
But I also have other components like storytelling, which isn't really an industry. It's just a skill, but it's also a point of view. It's how I communicate and it's how I understand things. that, again, intersects with all these other pieces. So it certainly can evolve over time.
I think if you were to go back and actually excavate your childhood, who you were before you started editing yourself, I think a lot of these things, like you can go back and find artefacts. Of all of this in who you were when you were 10, as you experience the world and more of it, that might have expanded it.
I'm an adventurer. I'm a traveller that certainly didn't show up until I was in my 20s and had the money to do that. I think the portfolio changes with every season of life, but I think your Venn diagram Is much more stable and what changes is which parts of that Venn diagram get put to use.
For example, when I left the Metropolitan Opera to go to business school, I left my employment in the arts for what I thought might be forever. I wasn't sure. Then I had an opportunity. That sort of came out of left field to become part of the producing team for a Broadway musical. And suddenly that piece of me gets reactivated in a way that I never saw coming, but was absolutely the right thing at the right time. And now that's a big part of why work. I'm a professor, I'm an author, I'm a startup advisor, but I'm also a Broadway producer. it just was a piece of me that took a backseat for a little bit.
And now it comes back into my portfolio.
Sharad: So Christina, like you said, you were in consulting and then of course you were an entrepreneur how did that decision happen? Hey, I'm not going to go after a new job, but I'm going to do this thing called portfolio life, where I'm going to have these many interests.
Christina Wallace: In part, I think it's because that year in consulting, I struggled to describe that year properly because I love working at BCG. I loved everyone I worked with. These are the smartest people I've probably ever had the chance to interact with. I loved a lot of the questions we were being asked and the challenges that were put forth.
So the content of the job wasn't The mismatch for me, but it was the context. It was the fact that in client services, especially in a top management consulting firm like BCG, you have no control over your schedule. You can't join a choir that rehearses on Tuesday nights because you're on the road Monday to Thursday.
And I realised when I am in control of my schedule, then I can put the pieces of my portfolio in my week in a way that meets my needs.
And when I'm not in control of my schedule, like I wasn't for that year, I have these needs that can't be met and it was really frustrating to me.
and at the same time, a lot of the things that I had learned producing theatre, making art, making music. was relevant to and consistent with the world of entrepreneurship,
Like it's not perfect. You don't have everything you need and you have to get it out there and see how people react. You get that first user that says, I hate it. Or that first audience member that doesn't laugh at the joke. And you're like, okay, that hurt my ego, but now I have new information. Let's go back and reiterate.
so I saw so much of what I had already been doing and that I loved doing could be applied in this whole other space that was growing. It was hot. There was lots of funding and resources and support for this world. I thought, Let's see, what's the worst thing I can do? Fail? and I did fail the first one.
Total failure. and then I survived the failure, which is an incredibly powerful thing to survive the worst thing that you can imagine happening.
Sharad: What do you define as surviving? The failure?
Christina Wallace: I got through. So I don't come from family money. I don't have a ton of resources. I come from a working class family. I didn't have a partner of any kind. So no other income to keep me afloat. and I had a ton of student loans.
But I pulled it off. I rented a sofa in someone's living room for 100 bucks a week, and I ate pizza as my only meal of the day sometimes, then we raised venture capital and we were able to pay ourselves a salary, which wasn't very much, but it was enough to get my needs met. Long story short, when the whole thing failed and we ended up shutting down, I was broke.
I can't even move home because my family has downsized since I left home. And in that moment, I was like, okay, you don't get to wallow. Let's get moving. And I used that opportunity, especially because I was so completely just destroyed.
I had never failed at anything. There's no other way to spin it if we fail. I think the great joy of that is that I could just go out to the people who loved me and knew me, my network. I didn't have to spend the time spinning it. I could just say I need your help.
I have to both put my. my self perception back together and I need to find a job that will pay me enough to afford my life in 30 days. This is a burning bridge, and it made me do things I probably wouldn't have had the guts to do otherwise. I emailed 70 of the people in my network and asked them to get coffee, and crucially to pay for the coffee because I couldn't pay for the coffee.
and in those coffee chats, I asked them 3 questions. I said,When have you seen me happiest? In part because I can't remember being happy. I'm so sad right now. What do you come to me for? What's that moment where you think, I should see what Christina has to say about this.
Where do I stand out against my peers? And I took all of this data. 70 coffee chats was far too much coffee, by the way. but I took all of those answers and was able to construct a version of who I was and what I had to offer the world in a moment where I couldn't see myself.
in doing so, it actually pulled out some things that I had not seen. About myself that I thrive in the zero to one, like that uncertainty of how do we start something? that I love storytelling. I love to find the narrative. So people would come to me when they were.
On a job search when they were making a pivot, or when they were launching a product and trying to figure out what's our positioning there was a piece of that that really stuck out to folks that I had never really identified and so coming out of that. That dark night of the soul with a quite clear burning boat.
I can't emphasise that enough. If I had the luxury of wallowing for six months, I would have, and you don't learn anything new
I thinkThat's really powerful, and if you haven't experienced failure, I think the longer you get without experiencing it, the scarier it can be.
Sharad: I love what you've even written about failure. I think you could have a book on failure as well. There were such powerful things. And when I was reading the book, these three questions that you asked, Ithought, what wonderful questions. as you're talking about even your human Venn diagram, this helped you clarify your human Venn diagram.
And you got those three beautiful questions. Now, once you got clarity on the various areas of your life, how did you then proceed towards creating the portfolio life?
Christina Wallace: It wasn't great . Now I have a job and now let's put all the pieces back in. I've gone through these iterations where the portfolio gets too full. even though each individual thing brings me joy. Collectively, the portfolio brings me stress, and so I had this moment in 2016, where I just had too many things, all of them good, but collectively just overwhelming. I was a columnist at Forbes at the time and I just documented a day. I was like, I get up and I advise these people. I go to that workout. I have my day job over lunch. I review the fundraising plans for the nonprofit board. I sit on, and then I studied my music, on the subway down to my computer science class, where I also am like double checking my emails for other things, and I finished by eating dinner at 11 o'clock at night, which is a bowl of cereal, while standing in my kitchen, and I got a bunch of Messages from my friends, from my family being like, are you okay?
This doesn't sound sustainable. And I was like, Oh, I am a little stressed. and I have had these moments where, you know, you learn. What the right portfolio is when you get to the friction of it, not working.
so part of this methodology. is also the discipline to weed out, to rebalance, right? It's the question of prioritisation of what belongs in my portfolio for this season and what's going to take a back seat.
I almost think about it like a sound mixing board, right? Where you've got all these channels, of different instruments and different things. And. If they're all in the mix, it's cacophony. so you have these choices you have to make when you're making music, where you put some of them up, maybe 70 percent or 30 percent or 20%.
And then some just have to go to zero for a while. And in that moment, I was like, Oh, the power. The portfolio is also what you say no to, to make space for the things you need to say yes to, and collectively ensuring not just that you have all the things, but you also have rest. You have free time.
Sharad: Yeah, that sparks a few thoughts and a few things. One, I like the fact where you said that you put some of the activities to zero. You don't put it at 5 percent because if you put it at 5%, your mind space still has those six, seven things. So you have to just take it out for the season. I love that. I also like that capacity where of course there's a discipline to making sure you have time for rest and stuff.
I guess the issue is there are peaks and troughs, so you might have that 60-70 percent capacity, but in the month you've suddenly got many things and the problem that happens. But that's life. I guess that's stuff that you have to deal with.
Christina Wallace: it is, but it's also something you can't foresee perfectly. But for example, I know when the peaks are in my academic calendar. I know exactly when the beginning of the semester will be when finals will come when grades are due. I know what that pattern of my year looks like for my day job. So when I'm signing up for.
Other things in my portfolioI would be quite remiss if I chose something that is going to also peak. in line with the peaks that I'm already aware of. So this is where the design piece is really an intentional word because I can look out and say, okay, here are the crunch periods in this part of my life.
Let's counter program those crunch periods with the design. The rest periods and some of my other things. Let's make sure I say yes to a vacation before this crazy period. Let's make sure that the performances don't demand something of me at the same time as grades are due. and crucially my husband also has a portfolio life.
We do this as a family. we look at his schedule and our children's school schedule and the days that the teachers are doing professional development, which means we have no child care. We do this at a COO level planning for our family. it gives us the bones and the visibility into, hey, we're about to enter a really crazy 3 weeks.
Let's give each other the grace of knowing we're all going to be a little bit. At our wits end and let's make sure that we put some downtime in at the end of those 3 weeks to allow the recovery.
Sharad: How does that planning happen at an individual level as well as at a family level? How do you do
Christina Wallace: Yeah, at an individual level. I have a Gantt chart, straight up. I love my consulting Gantt charts and,
Sharad: B, C, G, they do the charts very well.
Christina Wallace: They taught me. so I do literally like a month by month Gantt chart. I look at my year ahead and I live my life at the beginning of the year, September, and the end of it is August and I map out, just on a month by month basis, at the big level.
What are the big, Notable things this month, whether it's a deliverable or a big due date or a, maybe a special, teaching thing that I've signed up for? I kind of mark all of those in and then I look at the other components.
We do this ahead of time, because the downside to a portfolio is if you diversify well, if you counter-program your peaks and troughs well, you will never officially have downtime.
Sharad: Yeah.
Christina Wallace: So knowing that's a flaw of the system, you then just have to schedule downtime as though it's one of your, and this is particularly true again, if you have a partner who also is doing work like this. so I put together my pieces and
We have an agreement within our family that only 1 of us gets to write a book at any given time.
we can't both be giving weekends over to deep writing, because that's also when we spend time with our family. So it becomes a little bit like one of us Gets to be the primary parent for a few months while the other one gets some protected time on the weekends and then we swap and we make sure as we check in with each other.
Do we feel like on any given day? It's not equal by any mean, but do we feel like on balance
Hmm.that it has worked out to feeling equal that you're giving as much as you're getting? and that doesn't feel mismatched in the relationship.
Sharad: And as you're planning this, it struck me like you've got one core kind of job. So like for you, it's teaching with Harvard entrepreneurship and, and your husband has this thing. So does that normally help? Because then you can plan through the pattern, have other things fit around it.
Christina Wallace: yeah, it can help, right? It's certainly useful if there is n't a full time job, but if there's a piece that is a little more predictable, or you have a longer visibility into the line of sight, then it's easier to take on other things that have less visibility.
so that's also how you think about diversification. and designing this portfolio, are there pieces that can offer some stability and visibility. That allows you to have other pieces that have less visibility, less predictability. if everything is. Up in the air, it can feel overwhelming and if everything is stable, it can feel boring.
Sharad: Yeah.
So how can you find that, that mix as you're putting this together, that offers you. Stability and also movement. As you've been trying this over different periods of time, what has been one really surprising thing you've not even written about that's come about? Yeah.
Christina Wallace: I think that the era of entering parenthood was just something that I knew would require a completely different approach to this. it's not just about parenthood in general.
Who are your children? Some children have special needs. Some children are colicky as my second one was, and the whole first year of life, you're in survival mode. If you have a partner, what kind of parent are they? All of this is impossible to plan for. So I think,entering the 1st, 2 years of becoming a parent, Required a lot more grace with myself. I felt like I was failing at my portfolio life because all I was doing was parenting, working and trying to sleep, but not actually getting any sleep. I was like, I'm not making anything. I'm not performing. all my creativity is gone.
I realised that, for that season, I had needs. I was taking care of myself to the best of my ability. I was taking care of my family to the best of my ability. And I was taking care of my marriage to the best of my ability and everything else just had to go to 0%.
and I assume there will be more seasons of life like this, where there are some changes that are. Smaller transitions. And then there are some that are like back to the drawing board. now that I know that it gives me a little bit more,
Sharad: grace to say okay, we're going to go to zero. It's almost like zero based budgeting. You take everything out. There are no assumptions. And we rebuild for what this season has to be. Very interesting. I went through something very similar as well. Two under two takes a lot of pressure and there's some things which are much more important than, The way you've designed your life and it's okay for that season for those two, three years to give time to it.
And then you can come back to designing it the way you want it, but then also prepares you that these seasons will come again
Christina Wallace: And that's why I love the term season and not just chapter because seasons come back, right? Like you get another chance at fall. and I think that's the part that I. Struggled to remember at the beginning. I was like, this is not the new normal forever. This is just for this season.
but I think also I struggled personally as a woman who's always been very ambitious and always been very career focused with the voices in my head that said, Is it true that once you have kids and you're a mom, like you no longer care about your job. Like I've always said it's not true, but I wasn't a mom.I I really hated for a minute. My priority was my children. It sounds crazy to say out loud, but I felt like I was letting down all of feminism. And then I had a moment in the middle of the night, when I realised that I am still ambitious. But my ambition is now expressed in more ways than just my work.
And that part of my ambition is In setting up the relationship I have with my children is I really want them to still like me when they're grownups,I want us to have this long, productive, beautiful relationship and that starts with how we lay the groundwork when we're first getting to know each other, right?
As kids and parents. I have an ambition that my marriage will not just become roommates who are trading off on a list of tasks during this era of parenting. To do that, I have to invest a lot of work as we go through this transition. and it's okay if that means that ambition is being directed in these other planes. That means there might be a little bit less directed. In the work plane or in some of these other hobby planes for a while, I didn't lose it. It's just being repurposed.
Sharad: I love that. I love that. So it's like your core skill is not going away. It's just directing itself in a different way. And you did the storytelling for yourself to clarify for yourself. That's the way it's going to go.
Christina Wallace: I love that. You said that because so much of this are the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves
Sharad: Yes.
Christina Wallace: can either hold us back or give us the permission to do what needs to be done.
Sharad: storytelling,it's an iterative process.
Sometimes you may have come up with something which may not have been authentic. And that's the thing about storytelling because It's very subjective. If the story is not authentic at some stage, it will not hold true. And you'll have to change the story. That's the path of getting to the true story that sits and is empowering. So as we talk about portfolio life, of course, we've talked about interest. What about the money component?
Christina Wallace: Yeah.
Sharad: money as a family. How does that come in and how do we make sure that also is taken care of?
Christina Wallace: What I think, Is so empowering about a portfolio from a money perspective, a couple of things. Number one,your money needs don't have to be met by the same part of your portfolio as your growth needs, your community needs
You can see this in places where.people want to make these shifts where you say, what was a hobby can now become the thing that supports you andHow you made your money now can downshift as you go through these different chapters. That's powerful in a world where layoffs could occur, where technology might make a piece of your portfolio redundant. Having that diversity of skills and networks and industries allows you to decide which piece gets monetized as you go through these transitions.
You're not stuck at a dead end if your main source of money suddenly disappears. Goes poof.then there's a piece that says you don't have to make all your money from one. Piece of the portfolio. I'm a writer and a speaker and a teacher and that's a very common form of monetization through multiple lines of very related work.
but separate income streams, because being a writer and a speaker and a teacher individually, none of them pay enough to cover a mortgage in Cambridge. But collectively. It works. it's the creativity to step away from. I'm getting my money from one job. That job will be consistent over time and it will be enough.
Sharad: It will always be enough to cover the season of life. I'm in. And if I can't do that, then I have failed. Right, that's the narrative that our parents operated under certainly that of our grandparents and because it was true. Then it's just not true anymore. Absolutely. In your book, you've got so many interesting practical exercises, and you talked about one of those three questions. Are there any other exercises that come to mind which people have played back to you and said, this was so good? Maybe you can share it with the listeners.
Christina Wallace: sure. So the 1st kind of series of steps that I have you walk through is figuring out what's in your Venn diagram.
And this is where you can go and ask those questions and get the input from other folks. Then the next step is to get a sense of what's in your portfolio. We all have a de facto portfolio. It might be 90 percent allocated to work, but it is a portfolio. And as part of that, there's a couple of exercises.
The 1st is figuring out what you need. And this can take a little bit. Like I need an office with a door that closes.
Sharad: I'm in it right now.
you said that and I said I need that . I
Christina Wallace: I need that. And I didn't realise how much I needed that until the pandemic. When I was stuck at home working with my husband who has this insane phone voice and his work is talking to people and my work is thinking, and those two jobs do not work as
Co-working spaces. So being able to identify those needs, step one, really giving yourself permission, like non judgmentally, what do I need? But then the next step is what do I wish for? And I love this. I did not invent this exercise. I borrowed it from a friend who blogged about it. But it's forcing yourself to come up with a hundred wishes for your life.
And I love the term wish rather than goal. Because a goal can easily fit into an achievement mindset.
I have wishes
Like my children, I want them to play a part in my life. I want to be able to pick up my grandkids when I'm 90. and these are things that I want to be true for my future life. And then that allows you to back solve for, okay, so what do I need to start doing to ensure that wish can come true?
I want to pick up my grandkids when I'm 90. I better start. lifting weights when I'm 40, right? there are things that you have to invest in if you want it to be true. The same as having a great relationship with my kids. So I love this because a hundred wishes is a lot.
Sharad: Most people can write like 20 are gonna take some work.
Christina Wallace: It's gonna take some work. you can't just do it in one stint. sometimes you can get to 35, you start thinking beyond just your job.
For a wonderful example of this, my mother in law, Had this incredible career. She was trained as a lawyer. She worked as an executive in real estate for many years, and then shifted to social impact. Just incredible, like retired at the top of her game. And then I'm not dead yet.
What am I going to do? She had literally studied art history in Spanish in college and hadn't really done anything with it
so now in This post retirement chapter, she's training as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Sharad: Wow.
Christina Wallace: where she can give tours and be a part of that world and connect with the curators and crucially use her Spanish as we have multilingual tourists coming through New York.
Sharad: Such a great story. Christina,
When we, as we set up trying things in our portfolio, we are bound to fail and you've called that out and many of us fail in other things. I love what you've written about failure.
If you can give us your take on
Christina Wallace: yes. So failure is 2 things. The definition for me is when you thought something would happen and it didn't, right? So there's you see this in experimentation in the sciences, We had a hypothesis. We ran the experiment. It didn't turn out, arguably, that it was a failed experiment, but we don't attach.
morality to that when we think about it from science or from entrepreneurship, even point of view. And yet somehow it feels like a bit of a moral judgement when we fail, so part of it is separating out the judgement piece and just acknowledging that failure if you thought something would happen.
It didn't. It could have been your fault. Might not have been, then the second piece of it, You have to take risk in a portfolio if you want reward. If you play it safe, right?
That's actually a terrible thing. Route you never have the opportunity to really have one of these like breakout moments. so if you're playing it safe in your own life, you are capping your upsideand quite potentially. Putting yourself at risk, so failure, giving yourself permission to try things that might not work is what allows you to take some risks, which can give you the opportunity for some really big outcomes.And doesn't mean you risk your entire portfolio.
if you allow yourself stability in some ways. then you intentionally go and take some risks in other ways, the correlation of these things allows this where the portfolio can protect you. And that's where I focus so much as I'm raising my kids.
I'm like, how do I get them to be unafraid of failure and be willing to lean into I'm scared and I can do it. Let's see what happens. How are you doing it with your kids? Literally, we've made this a family motto. I'm scared and I can do it. we don't negate the anxiety, the fear. We don't, it's still there. It's still there for me too. and it's not a but. It's an and right. This is straight from my improv comedy training. Yes. We acknowledge I'm scared and I can do it.
We say it out loud. The four year old before she goes off to summer camp. She says, I'm feeling scared. I'm feeling a little nervous.And she says, I'm scared and I can do it. And then she goes off to camp. Very powerful. I'm going to try that out. I literally have now said it to myself on a couple of occasions.
Sharad: going to try it out for my kids and myself. Christina, thank you very much. But before we wrap up, if there's one piece of bottom line advice you'd like to leave listeners in about portfolio life, what would that be?
You are so much more than how you monetize your time. You contain multitudes. figure out what all is in there and give yourself permission to let it out. Thank you very much, Christina, for spending an hour with us on this podcast. Thank you very much. I'm sure. Everyone's going to love the wisdom that you have to share, and wish you all the very best.
Christina Wallace: Thank you so much. Great to talk to you.
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Sharad Lal: Thank you, Christina, for such an insightful conversation. For more on Christina, please check the show notes. Here's something all of us could try. To understand our own diagram. Let's ask close friends, work, colleagues, mentors, teachers, these three questions. What am I great at? What do you come to me for? What do I do better than most people? Now, if you haven't noted these questions down, don't worry. They'll be in the episode description and the show notes. I planned to do this exercise myself. So if some of you hear from me, please oblige. Best of luck as you figure out your Venn diagram. This is the key to setting up a portfolio life. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The next episode will drop two weeks from now on October 22nd. Do join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead.
Bye bye.