Put your life into the juicer for a blended life and portfolio career

I meet a lot of people who don’t know what they want to do or where to start. I also meet a lot of people with loads of ideas and no idea what they want to do.   

It seems that work life balance is fading as a concept as people realise that if their lives are represented by a see-saw - with work on one side and the rest of their lives on the other - then that must mean that half of their life is made up of work! The good news is that nowadays a blended life and a portfolio of careers are IN. By this I mean that life doesn’t have to be a game of two halves, and you don’t have to have only one source of income at any one time. 

In a blended life you can mix up everything in your whole life, all day long. If you deliver the results, does it matter which hours you work and which you play, or that you’ve put on a wash while you wait for a conference call to start? And if you’re doing something you really love, work becomes play. Would you consider doing stuff you get paid to do outside of traditional work hours? How would it feel if it didn’t even feel like ‘work’? 

They say that young people today are studying for careers that haven’t even been invented yet. This talk of invention isn’t just for the young though and I know plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who have reinvented their whole lives. They have either carved out a niche from an element of a previous career to create a new business venture, or have applied their past experience in completely new directions where their skills and experience are still valid but they gain that extra dimension of purpose. This is simply by changing the industry in which they now operate in.  

As for portfolio careers – ask around - certainly a lot of the people I have met recently have more than one source of income i.e. they are working more than one job in a week and sometimes in a day.  Alongside creating and marketing an app, could you be setting up a referral service in your area of expertise and doing a little part time consultancy on the side? While many of us have in the past been used to doing one job at a time, now it seems that one job isn’t enough for all of us. While some are working two jobs just to meet mortgage repayments, others are choosing a portfolio career so that they can mix and match necessity with their heart's desire. 

Exercise: Write down on a piece of paper all the elements contained in your ideal job, assuming there are no obstacles and anything is possible. Now it may seem hard at first to believe that it is possible to find your ideal job but what I have learnt is: 

1. You don’t know unless you ask.

2. If it is not worth going for unless it meets your requirements, you’ve got nothing to lose by asking for exactly what you want.

3. Perhaps a portfolio career is worth considering i.e is your ideal job actually two or three smaller jobs you can do simultaneously?