Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - An Anti-Hustle, Pro-Rest Approach To Work | Christina Wallace

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

How to build a career that is sturdy, meaningful, and doesn’t burn you out.Description: Christina Wallace is a senior lecturer of entrepreneurship at Harvard business school, an active angel investor, and even a co-producer of Broadway musicals. Her new book is called The Portfolio Life. Her varied resume should give you an idea of what she means by this. In this episode we talk about:how to design a portfolio life for yourselfher philosophy of ambition how to create the freedom to failhow to engage in sane time management.To order the revised tenth anniversary edition of 10% Happier: click here For tickets to Dan Harris: Celebrating 10 Years of 10% Happier at Symphony Space: click hereSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/christina-wallaceAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, Dan here. Before we start the show, I want to tell you about a live recording of this podcast that we're doing in New York City on March 28th. I will be interviewing two frequent flyers from this show, the legendary meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, who will be just coming off a three-month solo silent meditation retreat, and Dr. Mark Epstein, a Buddhist therapist and bestselling author. The event will actually be a celebration of the 10th anniversary of my first book, 10% Happier, and a percentage of the proceeds will go to the New York Insight Meditation Center. Come early if you want for a VIP guided meditation and Q&A with me. Thanks to our friends over at Audible for sponsoring this show and the event.

Tickets on sale right now at symphonyspace.org. This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. It has always been true, but it is perhaps more true now than ever, that work can be a source of stress, frustration, and burnout. My dad used to say that work is the curse of the middle class, and he said that as a decidedly middle class person. So how in an ever more insecure work world where the pace of change is increasing exponentially, how can we build a career that is sturdy, meaningful, and actually provides us with a chance to rest and enjoy our lives once in a while? One where we can be ambitious and audacious and

creative, but also not measure our self-worth through our productivity in a way that grinds us down. My guest today has crafted what she calls an anti-hustle, pro-rest approach to work. Her name is Christina Wallace. She's a senior lecturer of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, an active angel investor and even a co-producer of Broadway musicals. Her new book is called The Portfolio Life, and her varied resume should give you an idea of what she means by this.

In this conversation, we talk about how to design a portfolio life for yourself. We talk about Christina's philosophy of ambition, how to create the freedom to fail, and how to engage in sane time management. Christina Wallace coming up. But first, some blatant self-promotion, our little BSP segment we do here on the show. Just a reminder, there are a few tickets left for the event that we're doing on March 28th in New York City at Symphony Space. I'll be interviewing Joseph Goldstein and Dr. Marc Epstein live for a recording of this podcast.

It's also a celebration of the 10th anniversary of a book I wrote called 10% Happier, after which this podcast is named. Speaking of the 10th anniversary of 10% Happier, our friends over at the 10% Happier Meditation app are offering a big discount. If you want to give meditation a try, join us over on the app for 40% off. Get this deal before it ends on April 1st by going to 10% dot com slash 40 and dive into guided meditations and insightful courses for a 10% happier you. That's 10%, all one word spelled out, dot com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription.

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Hi there. Hi, what can I get you? I'll have a strawberry mango coconut probiotic smoothie with wheatgrass. Anything else? Extra wheatgrass. Here you go. AirPods Pro with adaptive audio, available on AirPods Pro second generation when enabled. Christina Wallace, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here. Really appreciate it. Let me start with the obvious question. What is a portfolio life? It is a model that I created to help make sense of how you fit work and all of the other things that matter to you into one life that you live. As you think about your relationships, your health, your hobbies, your rest, how you allocate your time and your talents among all of those different pieces is what makes up your portfolio.

You call it pro rest anti hustle. Yes. I'm not against ambition or hard work, but I think there's this pervasive hustle culture that has come out certainly in a large part due to the ethos in the tech world that is kind of like this always be grinding, thank God it's Monday, like work, work, work, all the time at the expense of rest, at the expense of joy and hobbies

and things that aren't monetizable. And it's also one of the key components of burnout. So this notion that every minute has to be productive is just not sustainable strategy. You say you're not against ambition, but you do refer to the cult of ambition. I do. I think there's something about this high achievement world where we really identify with our work, our profession, that leads us to this cult of ambition, this notion of the second you achieve anything, it's like, okay, what's next? What's bigger? What's

the next promotion? How much more money can I get? And it can easily feed into work for the sake of work, rather than understanding what do I care about? And how am I going to prioritize that? I mean, one of the things that I speak very openly about is I am incredibly ambitious, but I'm ambitious in many different dimensions. I'm ambitious for my work. I'm also ambitious for my family, my relationship with my kids, my marriage. And these are all things that require intent and effort and work if I want them to be as good as they are. Unfortunately, most of those things are not things that are really easy to quantify. They're not things that you're going to brag about on LinkedIn.

And so it can be very easy to fall into the notion of more for more sake, the opportunity to sort of promote how hard you are working and how great you are rather than what do you really care about? How did you come to this philosophy? It sort of came in two waves. The first wave was when I was at business school. I came to Harvard Business School for my MBA and it was right when the financial crisis had started. Lehman Brothers collapsed like my third week of school. And I didn't know anything about

MBAs or business at all. I had come from this really sort of working class background. I had been an artist and a musician and a theater maker for my career before I came to business school. And so this whole world was new to me. And as we got here, and everyone was starting to freak out because we don't know what's happening and how long it will last and what it means for our futures. I had the great luck of taking a class with Professor Clay Christensen. And he's really well known in the business world for his theory of disruption and for a lot of his contributions to innovation. And I took a class with him and at the end of it, he took a turn toward the personal.

He said, I've been teaching you a lot about how to manage organizations and how to think about innovation. But right now, I want to have you think about yourself, your life, your relationships. And crucially, I want to ask you how you are going to measure your life. What is success for you? And it was really poignant because in that moment, he had just been diagnosed with brain cancer. We thought it might be the last time he would ever teach. And he really emphasized that he had had a lot of students come through the years and even his own classmates who said they cared about one

thing and then went off and kind of ran down these other alleys that made them really unhappy or in some cases landed them in jail. And so he really emphasized this like figure out what matters to you and then actively manage it, invest in it as much as you do your career. So that was the first phase. And then the second phase came just a few years ago. I'd been working as an entrepreneur in New York City for a decade. I loved it.

I had all of the pieces of my portfolio life in place. I was singing at an acapella group and traveling the world doing cool adventure things. And I had a podcast of my own. It was a really full life. And then my husband and I decided to have children. We had our first child, a daughter, and I realized that the portfolio that I had created up to this point needed to be rebalanced, that it wasn't sustainable for the next chapter of my life, and that what I wanted had changed, what I needed had changed, and it was completely

rational to reallocate my time and talents and redesign a portfolio for the next season of life. So a portfolio is thinking holistically about your life, inclusive of your career, and said portfolio can and should shift and change over time. Absolutely. I look at it very much like you think about your financial portfolio, right? You allocate across different asset classes according to sort of the risk and reward profile

that you have at that season of life you're in. So portfolio life can be very much the same. It's sort of predicated on these three ideas. Number one, you are more than your job. Number two, diversification is your friend. Certainly in a world that is constantly being disrupted by change, diversification is kind of the only way to future proof. And then number three, when what you want changes, you can and should rebalance your

portfolio appropriately. But it's an alternative model instead of thinking of work-life balance, like work and life in opposition to each other. It's an opportunity to think of work in the context of your life and how all of those pieces can and will change as you go through different seasons. Jared Ranere You go into great detail in your book about how to create this portfolio, how to manage it and we'll dive into that. But before you do that in the book, you give us a little history lesson. You mentioned the 2008 financial crisis.

I remember living through that. Can you walk us through the history? You talk about the golden age of capitalism and then what changed after that. Yeah, it's really interesting because this model that I think many of our parents or our grandparents have of what work looks like is actually a really relatively new idea. This notion that you sort of pick a thing, you specialize in it, and you do it for your whole career has only really existed in the 20th century. This era of capitalism where we needed to have people specialize to fulfill

one specific job on the manufacturing line or in our business model and that we really wanted them to almost be like cogs, right? You could substitute out one for another and that made the system quite robust and it made everyone a little bit interchangeable. And that's what the specialization offered. And in exchange for that very narrow focus, that specialization that we asked of people, companies returned the favor by being incredibly loyal to their talent. They offered lifetime employment in many cases, strong benefits, pensions, sort of all of

the, the upside of saying, you're going to go really specific and focus, and we are going to make sure there's a place for you here. As we shifted away from that golden era, that post-war boom, where there was sort of profits aplenty to share around, we got into the 70s and 80s where stagflation came about. We were seeing some grumbling from shareholders that they weren't getting an appropriate amount of the value of these firms. And we started to really see this shift, especially as Jack Welch came around with GE, of really optimizing for financial returns, for shareholder value, and employees and other constituents in the stakeholder

model started to really take second or third or fourth place. And what that meant for the relationship between talent and companies was that we're seeing a move away from lifetime employment, a move away from even full-time employment to contract workers, to the flexible model that allows employers to scale up and scale back when they need to in order to kind of manage that bottom line. It makes layoffs much more common and a lot of the social safety net that we saw provided through employers like health insurance and pensions 401 401Ks, really starting to get depleted.

And so it puts workers in a position where they have to be thinking much more about their own safety net, how they can diversify and build the ability to pivot and to be flexible as these moments of disruption come, because they don't have the stability that generations before us had. One of the arguments you make, and I think this may be at the root of some of the intergenerational conflict come because they don't have the stability that generations before us had.

One of the arguments you make, and I think this may be at the root of some of the intergenerational conflict we're seeing in the world right now, and in America in particular, is that it's become harder to reach what you call the milestones of a successful middle class adult. I'm 52 and have, through a bunch of strokes of luck, have been able to achieve home ownership and retirement savings, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of younger people can't because of some of these structural shifts in the economy that you reference. I mean, that's exactly the problem.

It's sort of each of these pieces, everything from the college education that suddenly costs six figures in student loans, even if you can successfully pay them back, that becomes what used to be the money you could set aside for a house or the money you could set aside for childcare. So that suddenly pushes back the resources you have available. Then housing prices have gone absolutely through the roof, childcare costs through the roof, and that's assuming you can find access to childcare. We're seeing growth of childcare deserts in a lot of places in the country. You see the

increased cost of healthcare. It's just one thing after another, right? All of these pieces individually have gotten harder to achieve and collectively, the sort of expectation that by the time you are a grown up, when you've got a career, you've put in the work, you can have a family if you want it, you can buy a house if you want it, you can feel that stability and that relationship to your community. We're not seeing that for millennials or certainly Gen Z behind them are saying that doesn't ever seem possible. So if that's not going

to be the payoff for the sacrifice and the focus and the loyalty that is expected of me, then how else might I create that stability, create the optionality that I need to find a little bit of happiness now? Because this notion of like, you know, do your work and work hard and be diligent and someday you can retire and have that freedom, that joy, that's not guaranteed in any sense of the imagination. Okay, so let's go back to the how of the portfolio life. You talk about the four pillars, identity, optionality, diversification and flexibility. You've touched on this a little bit earlier, but let's go through the four pillars

in a little bit more detail. So it starts with identity because a lot of this model, it really is predicated on you seeing yourself as more than just any specific job or skillset or the way you monetize your time. I think many of us in the US, we identify as our jobs, you go to a dinner party or a networking event and you introduce yourself almost always by what you currently do. And the challenge with that is that over time, especially if that

becomes your shorthand for who you are and how you introduce yourself, you start to put yourself into a box. You start thinking, well, that's all I am. And especially as you get further on in your career, you might have forgotten some of the other incredible skills or networks or interests that used to be a big part of who you were because you put them away to sort of focus and grow up and look serious. And so we start with identity because a big part of this is recognizing that we are all really interesting, multidimensional, multi-talented human beings. I call myself a human Venn diagram.

It was a phrase I came up with when I was fundraising for my first startup because I struggled to explain, you know, I had this double major and triple minor in college. I had this really eclectic resume up to this point working in theater and opera. And if I gave you kind of that whole background, if I read through my resume, you would think like, wow, this chick is a flake. She can't make up her mind. And in my head, I was like, no, no, no, this is all very intentional. I know how they fit together.

And so finally, one day I sort of came up with this phrase that I'm a human Venn diagram and I've built a career at the intersection of business technology and the arts, because this has been very strategic and intentional. Every combination of what I've done has fit into that framework. And I offer that as an example, because I think everyone is a Venn diagram. And in many cases, we have specialized as we take our first job or our second or third, we started to go down one path. But if you can remember all of the other things that you are, the skills you love and the

networks you're part of, and even just the interests, like I'm not very good at it, but it interests me. That is a relevant part of what you have to offer as you think through the steps of what you might do next and what else is in your portfolio. Optionality, the next key piece, because if you recognize that you are more than one thing, it becomes pretty logical to imagine that you can do more than one thing. I came across this illustration, I was able to include it in the book from Tim Urban, who blogs under the name Wait But Why. And it's this incredible drawing that I think we all sort of understand

the first half of it where it's like when you're born, you could be anything, right? The sky's the limit, especially if you have the great luck to be born into privilege of resources or a great education or supportive family. But along the way, you start making choices and doors close. And even if you could have been an NBA star or an astronaut, and I think many of us believe that the line straightforward from today is only one line. We have kind of one path. I really disagree with that. And I give some great case studies in the book of people who've gone to maybe extreme

versions of this, but have been able to see, no, I want to do something different, or I need to do something different, or I'd like to mash up my skills in a different way. And just because I've been a laser physicist for 20 years, that doesn't prevent me from becoming a professional origami artist tomorrow, if that's what I choose to do next. Identifying all of the options that you have is incredibly empowering because you realize you're not stuck. And that leads us to pillar three, diversification, because this is the piece that allows us to future proof against a world that is unknown and unknowable, really.

These moments of disruption, technological, ecological, geopolitical, biological, they're coming faster than ever before. So we literally can't plan for what the future looks like. And the only way to be prepared for that is to have diversification. This is one of the great upsides of a diversified financial portfolio. You can absorb some of the systemic shocks,

the systemic risk that you can't plan for. It's the same in a portfolio life. So whether you think through, what's my work? And then what are my hobbies? What are the communities that I have relationships with? What are the other things that bring me joy? My health, my downtime? All of those pieces, they create diversification such that if you need to make a big pivot,

you can lean into these different dimensions and not feel like you're stuck. And I give some great stories in the book, particularly one of my friend, Carla Stickler, who had been a Broadway actress and was able to pivot into being a computer programmer during the pandemic when Broadway was closed because she had started to develop that hobby before she needed it. And then the last piece, flexibility, this comes back to the seasons of life. This is, I think, one of the biggest challenges I see, especially when we are looking at how do we make work work for people as they go through these different chapters,

whether they have young children or whether they are taking care of their parents or they have a health crisis of their own or maybe they're just burnt out and need a sabbatical. How do we think through the chapter that I'm in and what I need right now, allocate my portfolio according to that. And then when that chapter changes, I can rebalance, I can reallocate to suit what I need there.

This all makes a ton of sense to me. Oddly kind of makes me feel safe as I hear it. But speaking of safety, we all want it. We all want anxiety reduction. And it can be a problem if we're afraid of failure. And you talk in the book about the necessity of failure. Can you just say a little bit more about that now? Sure. We all want safety, security. And I think one of the great challenges of today is that what we believe is safe and

secure, having a stable full-time job where you are loyal to an employer is actually not safe anymore. We've seen how loyalty is not rewarded and that things can change in a heartbeat. And so going all in on one thing is the opposite of safe. So as you think about portfolios in the financial sense, right, you can see how adding risk to your financial portfolio is one of the ways that you can increase your return. I mean, there's a specific relationship between risk and reward. And so you know, right, you can't keep your entire financial portfolio in cash under your mattress, you have to invest it and you think

about what are some of the more risky options? And maybe I put a small amount there. And then I put a larger section of my assets into something a little more secure. And across the portfolio, it allows me to take some risks and still be able to feel really supported, even in the moments of some failures, some problems along the way. And I think this is true in your portfolio life as well. If you do the equivalent of keeping your assets and cash under the mattress, that's picking a job and staying there full time and not continuing to build your skills

to network outside of your company or your industry, to think that the future is going to look roughly like today and so what I have today will continue to exist, you're going to be really thrown for a loop when that is no longer true. And so this idea that failure is not a bad thing, it's not a moral judgment, it's a way to think about I thought something would happen and it turns out it happened differently. And that gives us hopefully permission to take some chances, to take some risks and say, I'm going to try that thing. I'm going to pick up a new hobby I might be terrible at. I'm going to start a side business and see if anyone wants what I have to offer. And it might

not pan out, but it also might. And in seeding multiple bets, putting a little bit of risk into your portfolio, you have the option to test out and in some ways de-risk an opportunity before you put a little bit more into it, right? You know, failure is this really scary thing. And I'm with you. I never failed in my life up until the moment that my first startup failed. And when it failed, it failed really badly, like so badly that we wrote a case study here at Harvard Business School on my failure and we teach it to all 900 MBAs on what not to do. And in that moment of failure, I was lost, right? Like I poured myself into bed and I didn't leave

for three weeks. I watched all seven seasons of The West Wing as to avoid dealing with reality. But when I got up I realized that the worst thing I could possibly imagine just happened to me and I'm still here. Yeah, yes. It's like a form of exposure therapy where you face your fears and realize like you don't need a defibrillator. Exactly. Yeah, I think this is hard for young people, and I'm not saying this as a boomer scold. I think we older people have created a world for younger people that lacks the necessary amount of friction and challenge. So when I was a kid, I was a free range kid and I rode my bike all over town and without a helmet, I'm not saying we should do that, but in the 70s that was the thing.

We had a whole Lord of the Flies world away from our parents. That doesn't really happen anymore. We have all this technology that makes it so easy to get a cab when you need one, to get food on demand, to get a hotel or rent somebody's house. Life is so much easier in so many ways and that makes it harder because we're not set up to handle adversity. And so this makes perfectionism and fear of failure even more sort of acute. Absolutely.

And I'm an elder millennial. I was a child of the eighties, but I sort of remember those days in my younger life where we had kind of that free range mentality. And then by the time I got to college, it was very much the world where everyone gets a participation trophy and everyone is so scared of making mistakes. I think in large part because we really reoriented toward you have to get into a good college. If you don't get into a good college, your entire future is destroyed. And that just turns into like, you know, starting from pre-kindergarten,

how am I setting myself up to make it through what is now like the Lord of the Flies, but applied to college admissions? Yes, yeah. If we can reorient away from that and really do focus, and I think about this myself, I've got two young kids now, how do I build

that muscle of resilience and of comfort with uncertainty, comfort with discomfort, right? How do I get them used to and familiar with that moment of saying, I don't know how this is going to turn out. I'm scared and I can do it. And it's okay if it doesn't work out, I'll figure it out from there. It's a real muscle that will's okay if it doesn't work out, I'll figure it out from there. It's a real muscle that will atrophy if it hasn't been appropriately flexed along the way. Yeah, this is something I talk to my son about a lot. He will be nine by the time this posts.

We had an experience the other day where he was actually somehow, I didn't even know this was happening. He had gotten into the habit of teaching the other kids in his elementary school how to do meditation Which I had never like I have been very careful not to push on him So I was really surprised that he knew how to give the instructions I mean, it's not entirely surprising he travels with me and when I'm giving speeches and I get how he picked it up But like I definitely have not pushed it on him. Word had gotten out that there's this kid

who can teach meditation. And so the high school invited him to come teach a gymnasium filled with high school students. So I went with him and grown ass adults basically are filing into the room and my son is really nervous. And I'm like, okay, well, we've talked about, can you handle discomfort? This is uncomfortable.

And I, with my history of stage fright and panic disorder, am really uncomfortable for him and I'm just kind of hugging him a little bit. And then the guy leading the rally or whatever it is introduces Alexander Harris. And as soon as they called his name, my son just like, all right, sucked it up, walked over there, grabbed the mic and did the thing. And I was so proud of him. And I mean, it really just goes to this point of in a world where that we've poorly designed for them, we've got to teach our kids to get comfortable with discomfort as hard as that

is. And it really is hard. I chalk up a fair amount of my comfort with this to my childhood of learning to perform. I started piano lessons at four, I picked up cello in middle school, and I was singing choirs my whole life. There was always that practice of, I am terrified, and it's time to walk out on stage. Most of the the time it turned out brilliantly and one or two times I absolutely did fall on my face and had to figure out how to salvage it from there. And I think that from a really early age built a fair amount of tolerance for that discomfort.

And then in my 20s, I started traveling the world by myself. I had not gotten to travel at all growing up. It just wasn't something my family could afford. And I finally was in a place at 22, 23 that I had some time off. Didn't have a ton of money, but I was like, you know what, you could do it on a shoestring. And I would just book a flight into a country and book a return flight a month or two later, and get a Lonely Planet guidebook and a backpack and figure it out. I didn't even know where I would stay the first night I got there, but there was a fair amount of, I'm going to figure this out. It's okay that I don't know. I'm smart enough, I'm strong enough, and it's going

to probably work out okay. And it always did, more or less. And I think that was another really great opportunity to kind of really build out that muscle for discomfort and for problem solving. Just because it didn't turn out great at the first iteration doesn't mean I can't salvage it. Amen. Coming up, Christina Wallace talks about how to create your own Venn diagram, how to design a business model for your life, and we talk about sane time management. I'm Peter Frankenpern. And I'm Afro-Hirsch. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled

musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time, somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally floored me.

And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Hello, I'm Emily and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous,

the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks, you know who I'm talking about. No? Short shorts? Free cocktails? Careless whispers?

Okay, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right, it's Stone Cold icon George Michael. From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet, join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom. From the outside, it looks like he has it all. But behind the trademark dark sunglasses

is a man in turmoil. George is trapped in a lie of his own making with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wandery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wandery app. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 10% Happier Book, we're offering subscriptions to the 10% Happier Meditation app at a 40% discount until the end of the month.

Get this deal before it ends by going to 10% dot com slash 40. That's 10%, one word all spelled out, dot com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription. All right, let's go back to your first pillar, which is identity and thinking about your Venn diagram. If listeners want to create their own Venn diagram either in their mind or draw it, how do they do that? What are the key questions to ask? Sure. So there are two exercises that I offer in the book that can contribute to this piece

of the framework. The first is if you are someone who's pretty self-reflective, you like having that moment to go in deep, grab a stack of sticky notes and start thinking through. You know, you can start with the obvious stuff. What do I do now? What are the things, the skills, the talents that I get to exercise all the time? And then you can start working backwards. What else have I done in previous jobs and previous lives? Go all the way back to like those ridiculous jobs you might have had in high school just to get some extra money. What were you good at? And what did you like doing? And then start going into some of your other interests. What's the section of the newspaper

you read first or the corner of TikTok that the algorithm has taken you to? What are some of those things that are part of who you are, even if they aren't the first thing that would come to mind at a dinner party? And then the last thing is sort of like, what else have you been known for? Maybe it was there was a thing in the, I don't know, the fifth grade, you were like the best at free throws. Kind of go back and excavate some of those things, because that evidence actually might turn out to be relevant. I don't know if all of the data points are, but it's helpful to just have that all in writing. If that self-reflection isn't particularly productive or it's just not your style, the

other option is to go out and connect with your community, your network, and ask them to tell you who you are. I did this when that first startup failed and I was really feeling lost. And I went out and did like 70 coffee chats. And you do not need to talk to 70 people. I'm a little bit extra. Like that's too much. But go out and get a pretty diverse range of inputs from people who've seen you in multiple

contexts. And I asked them all the same three questions. And I think they're useful for anyone. The first is when have you seen me happiest? Because that might point out a specific context or skill set or industry or community that really brings out the best in you. The second is, what do you come to me for? Like what is that spark where you're like, you know what, I should see what Christina thinks about this. And then last, where do I stand out against my peers? Because that often will uncover things that we don't realize are superpowers, because they probably come pretty easy to us, but in fact,

are rare in the larger context. And that might be an opportunity to become what I call well lopsided, rather than well balanced. So you can go out and kind of get this external feedback, or you can excavate it from your own internal self, and you just pull all of these data points together and start grouping them, start to identify themes. Your Venn diagram, it could be industries, it could be skills, it could be particular approaches to how you think about or organize work. It doesn't have to be like perfectly parallel from one circle to the next, but kind of looking for clusters and crucially where those clusters might overlap.

Maybe you have, you know, finance and coaching as two very specific, discrete things. And then you see that intersection of like personal finance and writing on a blog and teaching other people how to manage it. That's where those two worlds collide. And you start to see opportunities at those moments of intersection where you might not have thought about playing before. Where do you follow this argument about following one's passion? I had long advised people I knew to follow their passion, but then I think it was Cal Newport who was on the show explaining to me that some people don't actually have inborn

passions or that they're aware of it. The passion can emerge from engaging earnestly with something that you may or may not be interested in from the outset. No, I actually agree with that. I am very pro doing things with your life that matter to you as opposed to things that other people are impressed by. And if you have a passion and if that is clear, then that is relevant to really think about

how can I keep this in my life? The caveat on that is that your passion might not be the way that you pay for your life. It might not be the main source of income that becomes sustainable. I see lots of artists and musicians and actors who say, I love this and I don't love the day to day of the business of it. And so they look for opportunities to say, how can you build a sustainable life and still keep your passion in your life in a way that brings you joy rather than makes you hate it. But for people who don't have that specific passion that they can identify, I think that's true at Cal said that there might be how they approach the work that really

lights them up. I see this in my students in entrepreneurship that sometimes there are people who say, I really want to build a company in this space to solve that problem. And sometimes I have students that say, I just really like building things, going from nothing to something. And the act of figuring it out and running tests and asking questions and getting a whole bunch of people aligned with this vision. And honestly, I could sell pet food or I could sell insurance.

And that doesn't matter to me. What matters is that day to day work. That's what I am passionate about. And so I think passion can be defined in many ways. It doesn't just have to be a specific type of work or industry or skill that you love. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so now we've designed our Venn diagram. The next step, if I'm reading you correctly, is to design the business model for your life. What does that mean?

Yeah. I mean, this is very much what I was just talking about with my friends who are artists and are feeling burned out by quote, following their passion. Because there are lots of ways to think about the business model for your life. I give these three versions of a business model in the book, but these are just three examples. One is where you have kind of a day job and then a moonlighting project. It could be a hobby, it could be a side hustle that you monetize, but you basically have the good enough job that gives you what you need, health insurance, a steady paycheck,

nice predictable hours that you can plan around. And then you find other ways to bring these other things that you care about into your life, into your portfolio, through other avenues. The second is this idea of like a zigzag life, where maybe you are all in on this one world, one job, one source of income. And then along the way you say, I want to pivot and go all in on this other thing. And I have to find that connective tissue the way to zig and zag in order to be able to pursue that. I give an example in the book of my best friend, Kat Jennings, who was a middle school biology teacher for almost a decade and a half, and then realized she really wanted to be a doctor.

She wanted to be an OBGYN. And so made this very dramatic zigzag from being an educator to going to medical school in her mid thirties in order to pursue this new path. But what I love about zigzaggers is while they look really unrelated on the surface, you're like, you were doing that and now you're doing this. What's going on? Many times in almost all cases, that first path, that first life you are on, it gives you a point of view, an experience level, a skill set that you bring to the second path, that actually puts you in a really interesting place to be a leader, to be successful in that.

You're not starting from zero, I guess is my point. And then the third business model I offer, the multi-hyphenates. These are people who live in multiple worlds at the same time. Maybe it's they have multiple sources of income, right? They might be a freelancer that has lots of different clients or an entrepreneur who also has a writing business or is thinking about kind of other pieces. We often see this in speaker, writer, coach, multi-hyphenates or actor, producer, director, but it could also be in other things. I give an example in the book of my friend Kat Mustatia, who was a playwright and a computer developer, a programmer. And she would write code and write plays and they had nothing

to do with each other, but she did both and they were both really important to her. She was visible in both of those worlds simultaneously. And what's interesting about multi-hyphenates is that they often are at the vanguard of the future. They're the ones who spot opportunities for innovation because they live in multiple worlds that don't look like they're connected, but often do find an overlap. So my friend Kat, the moment where generative AI started to intersect with what is art, what is that relationship between art and technology?

How do we think about what that future looks like? She is perfectly positioned to weigh in on this. She understands the technology side of it. She also understands the creative side of it and ended up becoming a Ted fellow getting to do research in this space and go down that path. So multi hyphenates, it kind of looks like they're a little flaky doing all these different things at once, but often that puts them in the perfect spot to connect the dots between what used to be unrelated ideas and make them suddenly very relevant to each other. puts them in the perfect spot to connect the dots between what used to be unrelated ideas

and make them suddenly very relevant to each other. Let me issue a few caveats before I ask this question. First, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to recapitulate his argument with high fidelity, given that it was a while ago that I had this conversation with him. And second, I'm not sure there's any real disagreement here, so I want to be careful how I phrase this. But I remember interviewing on this show Scott Galloway, who is the host of the Prof. G podcast and also cohost of Pivot, and he was thundering against the side hustle and basically saying,

you know, like, if you're going to do a thing, do it. Don't have a side hustle. So I think I'm saying that correctly. Sorry, Scott, if you're going to do a thing, do it, don't have a side hustle. So I think I'm saying that correctly. Sorry, Scott, if I'm not. And if I am saying that correctly, does that contradict any of your advice? A little bit. I know Scott, I substitute taught in one of his classes at NYU once. I disagree. I think side hustles, moonlighting, whatever that is, there's value to it if you understand why it's in your life.

What need is it meeting? So in some cases, a side hustle might be an opportunity to make additional income that allows you to sustain the other thing you're working on. Maybe it's consulting income while you're building your startup because you haven't been able to raise money yet or you don't have other sources of support, like family money or a spouse that can pay for you to go without a salary for a while, that you're giving yourself the runway

to figure out the thing you are really intent on building. Or it could be because you get a lot of great things from your good enough job, but not everything. Maybe you're missing creativity or growth or community, You get a lot of great things from your good enough job, but not everything. Maybe you're missing creativity or growth or community, and having a thing you do on the side gives you some of those pieces, such that it actually makes you happier and better at your day job because you're not asking it to be everything. There's actually some great research on this I point to in the book that people who have

side hustles or hobbies, whatever those things are, they don't have to be monetized, but things on the side, it makes them better at their day job because they don't expect their day job to be everything they need. But I also think side hustles are useful as you are de-risking a new idea. Maybe it's before I go quit my job to launch this startup, maybe I do the startup as the side hustle. And I see if there's a there there. I see if I like it, not just the idea of it. I see if there's any traction in the market. I see if I can actually execute on some of these ideas and help people respond to it. And then once I have some good validation, then I have the confidence to quit the day job and go all in. But I struggle with anyone who offers sort of the straight

proclamation of if you're serious, just do it. Because I think that comes from a place of privilege that implies that you've got other ways to build that stability in your life, and not everyone does. And I also think it is particularly a common viewpoint among investors who say, you know, venture capitalists or other folks that say like, I won't fund an entrepreneur who's still in their day job. And I'm like, well, of course you want them to go all in, you're diversified. You have investments across the portfolio.

They don't. So it's better for you if they're all in, but it's not necessarily better for them. And that's where I take a little bit of friction with that model being straight up declined as a good model. Let's talk about time management because that seems central if you're going to have a side hustle or a portfolio. You talk about your tenants of framing time management. The tenants I see here are your worth is separate from your work, you deserve to be healthy and happy, your relationships, personal growth, rest and joy are not optional.

This is something that I've had to repeat to myself day in and day out, that productivity is not a measure of my worth. Certainly it was an ethos that was kind of built into my head from an early age, but I am worth something separate from whether or not I'm doing great work day in and day out. And a big part of that productivity mindset is that it makes it impossible to feel permission to rest, that rest becomes a reward rather than a requirement as a human being.

And I struggle with this quite a bit because I know the arguments behind it. I see the value when I allocate time for rest. I understand intellectually that a lack of rest leads to burnout. And it is still hard day in and day out to give myself that permission. And so I started this chapter on time management with those ideas because I think at the base of all of this, the root of this is a mindset and a narrative that we tell ourselves, right? This isn't the world insisting on us being over scheduled. It's us demanding that of ourselves. So this starts with a little bit of retraining.

And then from there, it requires some structure and some guardrails in order to implement this life properly. It is harder, because you've got a lot more moving pieces than if you just have a day job and nothing else. But I think it's really worth it. So I started the framework for this from a piece of research that I point to in the book that says the best run manufacturing lines in the world schedule their capacity to 85%.

They're not booking themselves at 100% utilization day in and day out, they plan for 85% because they recognize that planned downtime is cheaper than unplanned downtime. And that one way or another, you got to do maintenance on the machines. One way or another, someone's going to make a mistake and you want to be able to go back and redo it. And you know, sometimes you're going to have a customer that says, can you do this rush order? I really need it. And you want to be able to help them. And if you book yourself to a hundred percent capacity, the only way to accommodate any of those things is to go above a hundred percent and distress the whole system out, which costs a lot

of money and a lot of like psychic energy. So thinking through how can I put those guardrails in where my life, my portfolio is allocated only at 85% of my capacity, leaving space for life, for do-overs, for rest, for maintenance, for serendipity even. It gives me the space to breathe and also still enjoy all the things that I'm doing. for maintenance, for serendipity even, it gives me the space to breathe and also still enjoy all the things that I'm doing. When I try to go to 100% or 110%, which is what the startup world is always sort of demanding,

give it 110%. That's a surge. That's not sustainable as a daily mindset. And I think that's a really big struggle that we have. So how do you actually get this plan downtime onto your calendar with all the work you have to do and you have children, you know, who want everything? They do. God love them.

So, I mean, a big part of this is calendar management. And I do this not just with my life and my kids, but my husband as well. He has a very diversified portfolio. And between the two of us, we have a number of moving pieces. And so we actively manage our calendars, just like we were, I don't know, a COO of a company. Everything from our day jobs and the big deliverables we might have or big stress periods. He works in public service when he's got big legislative sessions, that goes in on the calendar and I have

awareness when he's going to be in these stressful moments. All of my big exam periods or crunch periods at HBS go on the calendar. But then we also put in all of the other pieces. We put in our workouts, we schedule those in and make sure that we've carved out the time there. We put in obviously the kids activities, when we're going to see our friends and how we're going to make space for some of that time. He's working on a book right now. We have a rule in our house, only one of us gets to write a book at any given time. So I finished mine and now he's on to his.

And his writing sessions, it goes in the calendar. We put this all in there and then it's pretty easy to look and say, have we taken up every free minute of the week? Or is there wiggle room? Is there downtime? Even when I factor in the time that I'm just hanging out with the kids, that's still childcare time, that's still parenting. So where are my breaks? That is one way, as people who love calendaring, it makes it really visible, all of the pieces. And it also helps us see before we reach these crunch periods, where the stress will be, and ideally redesign those moments, move some

things around or start saying no to something in order to prevent those really stressful crunch periods. Coming up, much more from Christina Wallace. I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And we're the hosts of British Scandal. In our latest series, we're visiting one of the rockiest sibling relationships ever. Okay, so I'm thinking Danny and Kylie. No, no, no, I'm thinking Anne Boleyn and the other Boleyn.

No, no, no, Barry and Paul Chuckle. No, it's Noel and Liam Gallagher. Now these two couldn't be more different but they're tied to each other in musical dependency. Despite their music catching the attention of people around the world, Liam's behavior could destroy their chances. However, their manager saw an opportunity to build a brand around their rebellious nature. It's got fights on boats, fights on planes, fights on land. They just fight everywhere.

If you like fights, you'll love this. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts. Or listen early and ad-free on Wondry+, on Apple Podcasts or on the Wondry app. Fish dreams of creating his very own polite and quiet podcast. That is, until he gets a surprise visit to his Fishbowl podcast studio from the Cat in the Hat himself, and it becomes very clear that the Cat has other plans for the podcast. And those plans are the opposite of quiet. Sing along to new favorite songs, try your luck at Titanic tongue twisters, have some fun with wondrous wordplay, and most importantly, bring your family along for all of the adventures in the Cat in the Hat cast. Follow the Cat in the

Hat cast on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the Cat in the Hat cast early and ad free on Wondry Plus. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Wondry Kids Plus on Apple podcasts today. You talk about this in the book and so I'm going to ask you here, what are the pros and cons financially when it comes to a portfolio life? I can imagine you make a little less money if you're doing this weird thing of taking into consideration your basic human rights. You might. It's true.

I'm certainly not a millionaire, and I guess I could be if I just worked all the time. No, I think there are definitely some pros from a financial point of view. When you are diversified, when you might have other sources of income, it gives you visibility and maybe a little more stability in your cash flows, knowing that one of them could dry up and you still have other sources. That's I think one of the biggest pros as you think about a portfolio that might say, even if you're not monetizing a hobby right now, I could if I needed to. If I got laid off, I could go out and start writing a column or offering consulting or

coaching friends or something. You have an understanding of different skills that you could put into place. The downside of this, number one, you need an accountant. The taxes are a little bit more challenging. The moving pieces can be a little bit harder. And if you want to have the flexibility of rebalancing your portfolio, you also need to think about the cushions, the resources that you might want.

So if you say, like my friend Kat, I want to quit my job and go to medical school to make this zigzag in my life. You say, great, how is that going to impact you for the four to six years that you're not making any money? How do you think through the financial model of making that zigzag or rebalancing there? Similarly, if you are thinking of bringing in other sources of income, being really confident

that they're not going to be problematic with your day job or thinking through sort of the implications there. So I think there are pluses to this, certainly from a diversification side, and the minuses are maybe from the complexity. And I guess if you are factoring in happiness, joy, rest, you might make a little less money from that. Sure. On the money tip, you talk about establishing a fuck off fund. What's that all about? My friend Paulette Perad, she came up with this phrase years ago. Many of us have been told to have an emergency fund.

It's sort of a classic personal finance tip. And I think especially for people who are struggling with resources, people who are like, I'm just trying to pay my rent and my student loans, like you want me to have extra money to put aside, it can feel really extra, like not particularly relevant. So I love how she rebranded it. And I love pointing to it here as the fuck off fund, because I think it helps you recognize a large part of flexibility is the resources to be able to say no, to be able to walk away from something that isn't working.

Whether it's a day job that doesn't feel safe, or a roommate that is creating a living environment that you're not loving, or a partner, a marriage that is not working for you, whatever those things are, having the ability to say, this isn't it and I want something else requires financial resources. It requires that cushion. And so I like this positioning as the fuck off fund because it helps me feel confident that I have the ability to say fuck off and move into a different dimension if I have that resource in place. And whether it's three months or six months or whatever that is really depends on what the rest of your portfolio looks like and the other people that might be depending on you. But a big part of flexibility is that cushion.

Jared Ranere Right. And you're acknowledging that for some people this may not be doable, but if it is doable for you, you should prioritize it. Nicole Bragalia Absolutely. Jared Ranere You also talk about getting paid more for your work. Yeah. This, I think, is a sensitive issue. I hesitate to generalize a little bit, but I've done enough reading on this front to, I think, feel semi-safe making this generalization.

I think this is particularly sensitive for women or people who identify as women to be assertive and ask for more money. So when you say getting paid more for your work, how do we do that? Yeah. I mean, there absolutely is research on this, that women are penalized more than men for asking for more, which is often why we see women less likely to negotiate in jobs. It's not because they don't want more money, it's because they recognize that they might be penalized for it.

But a big part of this as you think about how can I make my life sustainable without having to work myself into the grave? A piece of this is spend less and the other piece is earn more. And if you don't want to earn more by working 100 hours a week, you got to earn more by making more. And so it starts with if you are feeling underpaid and a large majority of people likely are to really understand what is market for my work, what else might be available without having to make a significant change in industry or geography that just allows me to make more

for doing the exact same work I'm doing. And a big part of that is talking about money with your friends, with your colleagues. And if you are a woman or you are a person of color or you are a woman of color, making sure that you're not just getting market research from other people who look like you, who might also be underpaid, but making sure you're getting market research from the people who are likely getting paid what they're worth and having that intel to arm yourself into that conversation. And I think equally relevant here is to anyone who is self-employed, whether it's full-time or just as a side hustle, that I think many of us when we are selling our own services

really struggle to put a price on what we do. And sometimes we feel like we should be grateful that we get to do this and we're honored anyone would hire us and end up under pricing our work. So again, understanding what market looks like, as well as realizing that every time you under price yourself, you are depressing the market wages that other people get paid. And so just feeling confident that being paid what you're worth is part of what makes this sustainable model.

And that if you feel weird advocating for yourself, just pretend you're negotiating for your friend that just has the same name and life as you. Somehow we're really good at standing up for our friends, even when we're not so great at standing up for ourselves. Toward the end of the book, you talk about a key idea for managing uncertainty, which is one of my Achilles' heels. I don't like me as MADEC, dread and uncertainty. The key idea is flair and focus. Can you explain that?

Yeah, this is a technique from the world of futurists. Futurists are a skill set within the business world that helps think through what might happen, what's coming, and how might we prepare for it. Flair is start from the problem or the instance that you're thinking about and broaden the aperture of how you understand the problem and what the potential solutions might be. So I give an example in the book of my friend Leslie Bradshaw, who at 38 was still single and really wanted to have a family someday and was a little bit stressed about how that she was going to make this happen. And in this moment where she decided to do a little bit of work and flare against this

question of what does it mean to have a family? And in particular, looking to examples of people who didn't do it in the quote traditional way, you know, a husband and a wife having a biological child unaided. And so she started looking at all the other versions, whether that was donated eggs or surrogacy or adoption or fostering or even just being an active part of her nieces and nephews lives. She took that moment to really open up her understanding of what a family might be and identifying these like eight different potential futures that she would all consider a family that would meet that goal of hers.

And then as she did that, she started thinking through like, okay, so what is the thing that I need to do to ensure that these are options for me? And one of the key steps in at least half of these options was to freeze her eggs, that that might make it possible for whether she does donor sperm or IVF with her future partner or some other version of this to have that resource put in place. So she went ahead, she froze her eggs, and it gave her the ability to say like, I don't know what the future is going to bring, but I feel like I have all these options and I've taken steps toward that, that give me some confidence, whichever version works out, it's

going to be okay. Spoiler, she ended up getting buried about two years after that and just gave birth to a daughter unaided with her husband in her early 40s and you know, was delighted that all of that stress was for nothing. And then the idea with focus is really to say from that big broad scope of options that might be a potential solution, what are one or two that you want to narrow in on and start pursuing and to see if there's any legs there, if there's any validated future there.

And if it doesn't pan out, great, you go back up to that big pot of ideas that you had at the end of this flaring session and like pick another one to keep working toward. But I think it helps broaden the sense of what's possible and in some ways provide a little bit of confidence that even if you don't know how the future is going to happen or what your role in it might be, you still have options to play an active part in designing your life. And I think that's ultimately what a lot of us are just feeling the lack of, right? That agency in a world that feels in many cases really out of our control. Even though you are building your own portfolio, No Man, No Human is an island and we need

other people, and you talk in the book about building your team and there are three concepts you talk about. One is to invest in orthogonal networks. Orthogonal is a word I've heard a million times, but still don't actually know the definition of. Forget mentors, seek directors, and then finally partners and partnerships. Yes. I'll start with orthogonal networks. I love this word. It means perpendicular or non-redundant. So my most common example of this when I was in college and I double majored

in math and theater, I had orthogonal networks in that I was connected to all of the theater kids and the professors and the guests that came through that program. And I was connected to all the mathematics people. And so at the moment where we were working on a play about Isaac Newton and the year that he invented the calculus and discovered gravity and a number of other things, his magical year, we needed people to advise on it from the math world. And I said, I know those people, let me go and find someone who can come in and help advise the development of this play.

And then a few months after that, the math department said, we have a whole bunch of doctoral students who are really bad at presenting their research. Like they're bad at speaking in public. It's so awkward. And I was like, I know someone who can help with this. Let me go grab some actors who can come and help them build out their presence. And so in that moment, my orthogonal relationships in these seemingly unconnected worlds allowed me to add value to both purely by being a connector between those two, and in some cases, a translator. So this is where, as you think about your Venn diagram, all the different spaces that you inhabit, being really sort of intentional and specific about where might I be able to connect the dots and create value simply by translating or creating relationships where they don't

already exist. The second one, as you think about directors rather than mentors, I think about this with the definition of like a board of directors. And I look at that almost like a governance perspective rather than sort of a mentorship or a, I don't know, just the relationship that often can feel like a junior versus a senior person in a mentorship. Whereas in a board of directors, you gather people who have particular expertise, they come in to play a specific role, and they advise the CEO, and in some ways sort of put some guardrails in place or set compensation

or they provide a sounding board for the CEO to have someone to collaborate with. And I think of the same thing here. We all struggle with this idea of like, where is my mentor? Will you be my mentor? Like you're going around asking any stranger who's like, will you be my mentor? Because we've been told there's this idea that someone will just open the doors and explain how the world works and advocate for us on our behalf. We keep looking for this person. And if you have that, that's amazing. But I think for the most part, we don't. A lot of people feel like, I don't have that one person who's everything. And so this is a model that allows a slightly

different perspective. Say on your board of directors, do you have someone who can be your coach? Someone else who might be your cheerleader? Maybe you need a little pick me up. Someone else who might be your negotiator as you're thinking through, like, how do I ask for more? How do I make sure I'm getting paid what I'm worth? Someone who can be your connector, someone who knows literally everyone and is like, you know what, I got someone for you. Let me make that introduction.

So as you think through kind of these different roles that you need to surround yourself with and who do I have that is invested in my future and that I can go to on a regular basis to help me move things forward. And what I particularly love about this model is you could be on that person's board of directors too. Like you can play a different role for each other. It doesn't have to be this you have experience and I need your help, subordinate relationship. And the last piece, when we think about partners and partnerships, I look to actually quite a bit

of the research and the work around co-founders in the startup world, right? That's the world that I operate in, and so it was a natural place to look. And I think what's interesting there is there's quite a wide range of models for what a partnership could look like. Maybe it's two co-founders who

have been together for a very long time building startup after startup together. They know they work really well together. And there might be someone who's like, I'm kind of a lone ranger. I like to do this myself and I'll bring in the people I need when I need them. I think you can see this in life partnerships too, where you might want a life partner in a monogamous sense of the word, and you find that person and you cultivate this relationship, this partnership together. But you might also be someone that says, I kind of want to be on my own and I'll have a partner for a season of life.

And when that season changes, I might revisit who that partner might be. Or maybe you're polyamorous and you have several partners that meet different needs for what you're looking for. So I think it's the same creativity that we bring to our portfolio lives. We can also bring to this notion of what partnership actually looks like

and design a partnership that fits who you are and what you need. Going back to the directors not mentors, something I often struggle with is feeling sheepish about asking people for their time. It can be hard when you think of it as a one-way transfer of value, right? If you're asking someone, hey will you give me your time so that I can ask you these questions and you can give me these answers. And what I, what I point out to all of my students, all of the startup founders I work with is everyone has something they can give everyone. I don't care how junior you are or how new to an industry. There's always something you can give. And as you think through how you set up these relationships,

it doesn't just have to be, can we meet and I'm going to ask you to give me something. It can be very much, and I want to also offer something in return. And whether that's like, hey, I'm Gen Z and I can explain what Riz means, or I can teach you about this particular technology or that industry, or I can help give you connections to this world. This is where those orthogonal networks become really valuable. Everyone can benefit from something you have to offer, but it's having that mindset to show up from the beginning that it's not just an ask.

It's not a one-way relationship. I have something to offer too, and I really want to be helpful in both directions. I just learned recently that Riz actually comes from charisma. Yes. I mean, I had heard the word. I'm not that out of touch, but I didn't really know the etymology of it. Before I let you go, one other thing you talk about, which seems crucial here if you're going to create a portfolio life and not just be all in on one career and one organization,

is as you call it, telling your story. You really need to be your own PR and marketing agent. So what are the key tenets when it comes to getting the word out about you? Yeah. I mean, this is one of the extra steps, right? That is required if you're going to have a portfolio life. Your life will not make sense on paper. If you expect someone to read your LinkedIn or see your resume and understand what on

earth you are doing, it's not going to work. And so you have to be really proactive about connecting the dots and putting the story out there. And so I give some exercises in the book to sort of write the one page version of who you are and what you do and how you fit in the world, and then boil that down to one paragraph, and then boil that down to just one sentence.

It becomes your kind of one liner in an elevator, I suppose. But to think through like, what is my story? How did the pieces connect? Why did I go from this to that to the other? Why are these interests relevant to each other? To put that work in, because often people want to understand you. They want to help you. They want to give you opportunities or introduce you to people, but if they don't entirely

understand what the hell it is you're doing, they're not going to be able to. So for anyone who really struggles to talk about themselves, they're kind of like, I hate bragging, I don't like doing this, why can't I just do good work and be noticed? I offer, again, the advice of like, pretend you're bragging about your friend that has the same name as you. Think through how can I arm my friends, my colleagues with the information they need to help me. You're doing them a favor. They want to be helpful, but put those pieces together. And then ideally once you have that story, put it on the internet. Make it easy to find you. Have a website or put it on LinkedIn or any other social

handles. Give that narrative to the world so that your people can find you. That's one of my favorite hacks of all of this. If you're like, I'm really interdisciplinary and kind of weird and I don't know where my people are. That's fine. Put yourself out there and let them find you. I'm going to ask my traditional two final questions. One is, is there something I should have asked but failed to ask? Typically people ask, why did you write this book? And my answer is somewhat ingest. I wrote this book to explain to my mother what the hell I've been doing with my life. But

secondarily, I wrote this book to just put a name on this thing that I've been doing with my life. But secondarily, I wrote this book to just put a name on this thing that I've been doing my whole career and crucially, a lot of other people have been doing too. But once you name it, it makes it legitimate and it makes people feel like they have permission to do this even more. That was a good version of telling your own story right there. And can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and any other resources you've put out into the world that you want us to know about? Sure. The book is called The Portfolio Life, How to Future Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout,

and Build a Life Bigger Than Your Business Card. And I've put out a couple of templates, particularly around a personal balance scorecard and a few other of the tools that I mentioned in the book at PortfolioLife.com. Christina Wallace, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to Christina Wallace. Great to talk to her. By the way, that episode I mentioned with Scott Galloway, I put a link to that in the show notes, so go check it out. 10% Happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman,

Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production. And Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing team. And Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts.

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