Just like the diversification mentality you use with your financial portfolio; we encourage you to use your talents to diversify your sources of income in multiple, simultaneous career acts. As with an investment portfolio, bad things can happen when you place all your money in one stock. (Are you old enough to remember Enron?)
Each career act should be an independent source of income and fulfilling from the perspective of growth, development, and engagement with your talents.
We have seen examples of simultaneous career acts all around us:
- The actor Jessica Alba started a company, Honest, focusing on natural, eco-friendly products for babies, personal care, cosmetics, and cleaning.
- The professional basketball player for the Denver Nuggets, Tyler Lydon, also ran a summer basketball camp for children in conjunction with Nike.
- The country music singer Blake Shelton has a successful recording career, has been a judge on every season of the TV show The Voice, and owns a restaurant chain called Ole Red.
If none of these people were recognizable, how about Benjamin Franklin? Franklin is one of America’s first and most famous examples of successful multiple career acts as a scientist, inventor, politician, and publisher, among other laudable credentials.
You don’t need to be rich, famous, or a founding father of a country to have multiple, simultaneous career acts. They are within reach of anyone who has in-demand technical skills, great execution on their innovative ideas, and energy. They are colleagues and friends of yours, who are using their talents for either related or unrelated career acts.
People with related career acts are generally able to use a personal or professional “brand” to propel their reputation within a field. Here are some examples:
- A physical therapist with a private practice, who also works part-time for a minor-league baseball team.
- A middle-school English teacher who offers English as a Second Language classes to new immigrants in the evenings.
- A retail women’s clothing store manager who started an online consignment store.
- A mechanic who works for an auto shop and rebuilds mid-1960s Corvettes for resale.
- A Pilates instructor who is employed by a national gym chain, but is also a virtual personal trainer on her own time.
Other individuals have multiple career acts that form a personal coherence. In these cases, while their career acts might not be in the same area, their skills from one career act often help to differentiate them in another career act. See if you can connect the dots for the following examples:
- A part-time cardiac nurse who runs an organic catering business for wellness-oriented clients.
- An electrical engineer who publishes science fiction novels with a technology theme.
- A project manager for a software company who owns and manages six rental properties.
- A corporate accountant who started an online service to tutor high school students in math.
- A maître d’ of a high-end restaurant who started a matchmaking service.
Whether in fields that are directly related or just personally coherent, many people today have thriving and fulfilling simultaneous career acts.
Research found that one of the primary motivations for holding multiple positions concurrently is career advancement, whether to develop competencies, learn new skills, leverage existing skills, or network. The study found that synergies between career acts are individually determined based on how people are motivated to shape their careers. In other words, if this is the career journey you want, you should choose the course that makes sense for the skills you want to grow and use.
You have the power to program the coordinates for your career journey into your own personal career GPS (and you can keep updating the software.)
Do you have the right mentality to engage in multiple career acts? The answer might be that, for you, one solid career act at a time is the best one for you. No judgment here either way. We are just presenting options and ways to diagnose what will work best for your ideal career.
Before we jump into the diagnostic, we want to prime you with some self-awareness.
People with multiple career acts call them by different names, like a “new gig” or a “side hustle”.
How do you react when you hear that a friend has a new talent-related side hustle? Is the reaction, “I knew they spent too much on that last trip to South Beach” or is it “I am so glad they are finally starting what they have wanted to do.”
The difference should be revealing – do you see your friends’ extra roles as a positive or a negative feature in their career?
Try another primer, this time thinking about a couple: Bobby and Tess.
Tess is a nanny during the day and loves to engage in her hobby of photography in the evenings and on weekends. Exciting for Tess, her evening and weekend fun has become increasingly profitable, so she has been gradually cutting back her hours as a nanny.
Bobby, her husband, is an IT professional by day. As a second career act, Bobby is a Web designer under retainer, keeping the clients’ pages current, interactive, and engaging. He also designs Web pages for solopreneurs, including one for his wife’s photography business.
Happy with the way their careers are growing, the couple also reached a personal milestone when they bought their first house.
Do you think that Tess and Bobby are stretched thin because they are doing too much or fulfilled because they are following their professional hearts?
Bobby and Tess will admit that their co-created personal and professional lives are not always easy to harmonize. They knew they were serious about this when they decided to sync their calendars. They are busy.
They couldn’t tell you what is happening in the latest reality TV show, and they need to schedule just about everything in their lives, including date nights and related activities that otherwise happen with greater spontaneity.
The question for the purpose of this diagnostic is whether you think Bobby and Tess are happy (or unhappy) individually and as a couple.
Do you think they are supporting each other as they move closer to their ideal portfolio careers – or just two people distracted with what they are doing independently? Your opinion of Tess and Bobby will reveal your attitudes about simultaneous career acts.
The idea of multiple career acts might seem daunting at first. Chances are high, however, that you are already balancing multiple roles in your life (e.g., student, parent, employee, volunteer, caregiver, coach).
This idea of having multiple roles in your life isn’t such a huge departure from what most people already do; the idea is just being applied to your career. How do you view the multiple roles in your life?
OK, you have explored a few primers, now it is time for the diagnostic. To what extent do you agree with the following statements:
- I believe that people who have side hustles are only doing it for the money.
- Most people with multiple gigs or roles are having financial problems and trying to make ends meet.
- The only people who can successfully have multiple sources of income without stress are those who have personal wealth.
- It is better to do one job well than to try to have multiple roles.
- I would never have the time or energy to work on more than one role.
How did you score? The more you agree with the statements above, the less likely you are to want to have multiple, simultaneous career acts.
Even so, we encourage you to keep reading for a nugget or two on portfolio careers. We want you to expand what is possible – but do it in a way that remains true to your values.
The only way to create your ideal career is to be honest with yourself. The more you disagree with the statements above, the more likely you are to thrive with multiple, simultaneous career acts. With this mindset, keep reading. This approach will be helpful to build your ideal career.
Everyone will be different in their acceptance of multiple, simultaneous career acts; this includes your family and friends. If you have a mindset that supports simultaneous career acts, we need to offer fair warning that there are likely to be naysayers in your life, those who want you to have a more conventional career.
Under the old rules of employment, people with multiple career acts would be chastised by parents, a spouse, or a nosy mother-in-law for “not having a professional focus,” “not being serious about your job,” “not sticking with it,” and “being too distracted.”
If you have the right mindset for multiple career acts, just give them your best teenage-inspired eye roll and keep doing what you are doing. (Scratch that. Be diplomatic with your mother-in-law and skip the eye roll.)
We would not be doing our job if we were idealistic about this approach to managing your own career. Usually, when people engage in multiple career acts, especially at the start, they are working when others are not. It is described as the difference between what you do from 9am to 5pm and weekdays (career act #1) and what you do from 5 to 9pm and weekends (career act #2, #3, etc.).
If you don’t have a career journey that will motivate you to work while your family and friends are relaxing and not working, then you might want to build a greater level of self-awareness before jumping in. Time is a precious and limited commodity. Use it wisely to have fewer regrets.
Dan Pink and a research team launched the World Regret Survey, analyzing the reason for individuals’ regrets across multiple life domains, such as work, family, education. The study found that one of the four categories of regrets was “boldness regrets” – regretting what you did not try or the chances you did not take. He wrote “What haunts us is the inaction itself. Foregone opportunities to leave our hometown or launch a business or chase a true love or see the world all linger in the same way.”
Sometimes people who want to try an additional career act will resist because they feel they will be cognitively stretched thin.
Research found just the opposite to be true: the empowerment felt from a desirable second part-time career act enhanced full-time work performance. People with a motivating and engaging second career act were less likely to have it conflict – and even more likely to have it enrich – their performance in their primary job. It is the same way a great side dish won’t conflict – and likely will enrich – the main course.
If simultaneous career acts comprise the career journey that would be right for you, we want to provide some direction and help you see this as an option.
If the thought of emphasizing the work domain of your life doesn’t appeal to you, then we want to help you find a career journey that aligns with your life goals.
This is your journey.
Paula Caligiuri, PhD is a D’Amore-McKim School of Business Distinguished Professor of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern University and a Co-Founder of Skiilify. Andy Palmer is chairperson and CEO of Tamr, Inc., which he co-founded with fellow serial entrepreneur and 2014 Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker.
The following is an excerpt from their book “Live for a Living: How to Create Your Career Journey to Work Happier, Not Harder“*
*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.