Hello, dear friend,
This time of my life has been strongly impacted by a need to make decisions that are aligned with my long-term goals and a respect for my overall well-being.
My professional path has been unconventional, with almost 20 years of entrepreneurial endeavors, overlapped with less than two years as an employee for Amazon London. Here I am, at the point where the story of my first business will come to an end very soon. I built a wholesale business in my early twenties, driven by my need to be financially independent.
This business was more than a stepping stone for my entrepreneurial debut: it set the groundwork for me to build and manage a team, deal with big clients, and get experience in supply chain and international purchasing. After graduating with my MBA, since the beginning of 2017, my role in the company has been more strategic than operational, allowing me to get involved in more projects chosen with passion.
Although it looks like I have prepared my way to make this professional change and move the focus to more attractive professional options, it is still hard to make a decision about what to do next. As my forties approach me, I find myself in the position of crafting the next stage of my professional life with an overview of my life in general.
Twenty years ago, I chose a business that had high chances of bringing me a steady income, leaving the other aspects of my life irrelevant to the decision. Now, the more I know about myself as a professional and as a person, I add other dimensions to the decision of my next professional endeavor:
Does it bring meaning to my life?
Does it contribute to my mission?
Can I have an impact?
How does it affect my lifestyle?
How is it aligned with my levels of energy and my personal life?
I looked at people that I know who have a similar life design and similar life values and I invited them to have a conversation. My main interest was to find out how they manage to keep a balance between being relevant professionals in their domain and fulfilled individuals within their personal life, their overall mission, and their other interests.
In other words, I searched for professionals who do outstanding work AND have a beautiful life. So their mindset is to think “AND” instead of “OR.”
The main conclusions were:
- Once they became successful and appreciated for their work, they felt the need for quality relationships in their life. More success and more money could not bring them the comfort of having a family, a wonderful group of friends, or a community they felt connected with.
- The pyramid of needs Maslow identified is accurate: one has to initially secure the physiological and safety needs, which are most of the time correlated with financial safety. This is required in order to be able to focus on social needs for love and belonging, then self-esteem and self-actualisation.
- One cannot run a marathon with the speed of a sprint. Periods of intense work are burning other aspects of our lives. If one keeps treating work as a permanent sprint, there will not be resources to nurture other areas of life, like relationships or hobbies.
- In order to bloom on the right professional path, most of them spent time answering questions related to meaning, mission, and impact. They looked at their life backwards from their retirement day, identifying what they wanted to have lived by then.
- They live by design, not by circumstances. It is easy to be outstanding in one aspect of life and let the others fall apart, with the excuse that there is not enough time. The professionals I admire are making constant efforts to design the way they work so that they have time for other meaningful activities, like time with their dear ones, partaking in hobbies, working on community impact, or engaging in ongoing education.
- Postponing delicate decisions will not ease the process. Treating a career with priority, as it is the sure bet for another decade, will not make it easier to allow time later for what matters.
- Multidimensional professional life takes the pressure from the results compared to focusing on one life dimension. Most of these inspiring professionals have more areas of interest. Some have their own business and teach in a school, others are consultants or investors on top of their main activity.
- Compare apples to apples. It’s amazing to have role models, especially to get a motivational boost and to learn habits that we want to master. But getting into the trap of comparing ourselves too much with other people or even different versions of ourselves could be misleading and lead us to burnout instead of inspiration.
- Worth is separate from work. We tend to identify who we are with what we do, but a successful professional life without health or family or friends or wellbeing or joy or time for hobbies is not the winning recipe. We really need to take care of all of them just like managing a portfolio with diverse assets. This is something that definitely changed compared to my twenties, when I was looking with high admiration at professionals thriving in mostly one aspect of their life.
Even if we are not talking about more professional pillars that build a portfolio, our life is a portfolio by itself with so many areas of interest that contribute to our fulfillment, long-term happiness, and self-esteem. So we better get better at managing them all together instead of one, despite the others.
I have always looked at my professional life with a portfolio approach, mostly driven by diverse interests and activities that bring me joy and also by a testing entrepreneurial mindset. But I came to understand better my life design after reading the book Portfolio Life, by Christina Wallace.
As leaders willing to make a difference, we really have to think “AND” instead of “OR.”
How do you manage your life as a portfolio?
How are the professionals you admire doing this?