
The Zack Arnold Podcast
How to Future-Proof Your Creative Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger Than Your Résumé | with Christina Wallace
Episode guests
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- Building a portfolio life involves diversifying skills and income streams by packaging and selling expertise to a broader audience.
- Failure should be reframed as an opportunity for growth and learning within the context of building a portfolio life.
- Establishing financial security and setting boundaries are crucial for successfully building and sustaining a portfolio life.
Deep dives
Exploring Your Passions and Identity
Start by taking an inventory of who you are and what you love. Write down your hobbies, interests, and the worlds you inhabit. Talk to people who know you well to gain their perspective on your strengths and what makes you stand out. Group these elements and look for overlaps or intersections between them.
Embracing the Role of CEO in Your Life
Recognize that you have the power to become the CEO of your own life. This means taking responsibility for your choices and shaping the direction of your career. Understand that no corporation or job can provide the stability and fulfillment you seek. You must take control and design your own path.
Identifying the Essence of Your Unique Skills
Look for the common threads and essence of what makes you uniquely talented and valuable. Don't focus solely on hard skills, but consider your values, character, and strengths. Identify the through-line that connects different aspects of your life and find your area of expertise or mastery.
Bringing Together Different Dimensions of Yourself
Appreciate and acknowledge the different dimensions of your personality, interests, and skills. Embrace the idea that you don't have to be every aspect of your Venn diagram every day. Instead, use it as a framework to explore opportunities for growth and fulfillment in various areas of your life.
Building a Portfolio Life: Exploring Diversification and Failure
The podcast episode discusses the concept of building a portfolio life, where individuals diversify their skills and income streams. One key point highlighted is the importance of creating passive income streams by packaging and selling one's skills or expertise to a broader audience. The episode emphasizes the scalability of this approach compared to trading time for money in traditional employment. It also shares personal examples of leveraging past work experience, skills, passions, and values to create a portfolio with multiple circles of expertise. The episode acknowledges the fear of failure and the significance of reframing failure as an opportunity for growth and learning. The importance of setting boundaries and creating a financial cushion is also highlighted in enabling individuals to make choices aligned with their values and priorities.
Overcoming Challenges in Building a Portfolio Life
This part of the podcast delves into the challenges of building a portfolio life, particularly for those with family responsibilities. While it acknowledges the fear and potential risks, the episode emphasizes that individuals can't afford not to explore diversification and building a portfolio. It suggests diversifying customer bases, exploring different industries, and considering functional diversity as strategies for minimizing risks and creating opportunities. The importance of defining and prioritizing personal and family needs within the portfolio is discussed, along with the recognition that failure is part of the process. Additionally, the podcast underscores the significance of establishing financial security and boundaries as foundational aspects of building a successful portfolio life.
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Today's guest is Christina Wallace who is an entrepreneur, author, and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business school. Christina is a self-described "human Venn diagram" who has built a career at the intersection of business, technology and the arts. If you've been a listener of my podcast for sometime or have attended my latest workshops, you will most likely recognize that term as something I highly support.
In our conversation, Christina and I talk about the history of how industrialization shaped the needs of the human species to specialize, but how that shift has now turned against the working class. We also talk about how the pandemic became the catalyst to trigger the rapid shift that made specialization become not only outdated, but the biggest risk in our time. We delved deeper into why the specialization model simply doesn't work anymore given the rapid changing circumstances we're going into right now, and what exactly we need to be focusing on as we move forward.
Christina and I also talk about building The Portfolio Life, which is the title of her book as well as a key strategy to become irreplaceable (even in these rapid changing times when many roles are being rendered obsolete). She takes us through the steps she describes in her book to find the intersection of everything in your life so you can identify what makes you who you really are as well as discover the value you can offer in any industry. Whatever industry you're currently in, this conversation will help shed light on your next steps if you feel you're behind and need to catch up with our constantly evolving world.
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Here's What You'll Learn:
- We thought the pandemic changed everything…but why is everything changing even faster now?
- How humankind shifted from generalists to specialists during the industrial revolution (and this matters so much now)
- Why having one clear speciality might be the biggest risk of our time
- If the business model in our grandparents’ time made them so successful, why can't it work for us now?
- What happened to the career ladder we were all supposed to be climbing…
- The meaning and difference between a deliberate strategy and an emergent strategy (and which one you should be using now)
- The danger of defining yourself by your career or skill set
- The benefits of transitioning to another career (and no, you’re not “starting all over again”)
- How you can use a Venn diagram to build your own Portfolio Life
- Why there is absolutely nothing wrong with failure (unless one of these two things happen…)
Useful Resources Mentioned:
The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity
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Guest Bio:
Christina Wallace
A self-described “human Venn diagram”, Christina Wallace has crafted a career at the intersection of business, technology, and the arts. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, where she teaches entrepreneurship and leads HBS Startup Bootcamp. Her latest book is The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build A Life Bigger Than Your Business Card (Hachette, 2023).
A serial entrepreneur, Christina has built businesses in ecommerce, edtech, and media. She also co-authored New To Big: How Companies Can Create Like Entrepreneurs, Invest Like VCs, and Install a Permanent Operating System for Growth (Penguin Random House, 2019) and was the co-host of The Limit Does Not Exist, an iHeart podcast with millions of downloads over 3 seasons and 125 episodes.
In her free time, she sings with various chamber choirs, embarks on adventure travel, and is a mediocre endurance athlete. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and their two children.
Show Credits:
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared by Debby Germino and published by Glen McNiel.
The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).
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