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To become more fulfilled and less vulnerable professionally, manage your career as you would an investment portfolio. Diversify a little time into your own special projects.
A career could be likened to a stock portfolio. Instead of money, you're investing time and energy. A safe bet—i.e., a linear, conventional career path—might pay off handsomely in material terms. But in happiness terms, perhaps not so much. Putting all our eggs in the safe basket, today's never-switched-off professionals face an increasingly difficult dilemma: how to achieve the much-vaunted work-life balance.
Compartmentalising our lives into "personal" and "professional" and assigning emotional value judgments to each—work being grim routine, personal life an elusive respite—is a path to unhappiness. We should start to look at the balance of risks and rewards our chosen career paths provide.
Our careers are getting longer, and our jobs less secure, as social mobility declines worldwide. More and more of us can relate to the famous line from Alice in Wonderland: "My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place."
What happens if, after investing 15-20 years in your job or firm, you feel you're not getting the return on investment you expected?
Diversify your career
You could find another stable but demanding job, but there's no guarantee the new job will be any more fulfilling in the long term. You could drop your job and pursue your passions, but that carries huge risks. By leaving a lucrative job for something offering little or no assured income, you might simply exchange one sort of half-fulfilled life for another.
Diversifying your portfolio by developing multi-expertise may be the best bet for maximising both money and happiness, while minimising potential risks. In his 2012 book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?, scientist Jared Diamond describes indigenous tribes whose elders enjoy a high level of respect because of their vast experience in various diverse activities. They are also generally quite happy because they see themselves as useful, and because they are not limited to doing the same thing all day, every day.
Securing the best of both worlds is the general idea behind the "barbell investment strategy", introduced by ex-trader turned scholar Nicholas Nassim Taleb in his 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Taleb advises putting about 90 percent of one's money into extremely safe options and getting adventurous with the rest. That way, investors can benefit from the big potential wins and forward-looking options afforded by diversification, without risking too much. The upshot: Play only on the extremes of safe and speculative; avoid anything in between. Hence, the resemblance to a barbell, where the weights are at both ends, with nothing in the middle.
Safebell and specbell
A barbell career strategy could mean taking two or more jobs, where at least one will fall on the safe extreme (I call this the Safebell), and at least one on the speculative extreme (Specbell). Depending on your situation, viable Specbells might include online courses, charity work, a part-time business, or even spending a few hours a week working in a different department of your company. You can follow your passions, even the non-paying ones, without overhauling your lifestyle. But it requires making reasonable, tactical negotiations with your boss and other responsibilities, including family.
The barbell strategy is something to be layered on top of work-life balance concerns, so that you can get the most money and happiness out of life. Relying solely on work-life balance to supply both money and happiness is like staying in Taleb's dreaded middle territory: always splitting the difference between work and home, never quite feeling like you're giving your all in either arena. The barbell approach acknowledges the shortness of life. Maybe you can't have it all, but why not at least try?
Small mistakes, big rewards
The barbell approach can also help people adapt to a much less certain world. Theoretically, investors following Taleb's advice would benefit even when they lose. Safe investments give financial cushioning to soften the blow of failed speculations, while the information and experience gained from such losses may turn out to be just as valuable as money. The barbell strategy lets people engage in trial and error, to tinker and to make small "right" mistakes that help them learn and improve empirically, but do not break them.
The same applies to careers. Having a Specbell could help one counteract the specialisation paradox, where increased competition for good jobs often necessitates ever-narrower expertise that then threatens to make one much more vulnerable to changes in the marketplace. Balancing Safebell and Specbell forces us to make adaptability part of our professional DNA. It may also lead to the acquisition of a broader range of skills to aid in the transition to higher-ranking leadership roles. Your Specbell could help make your Safebell even safer.
At the very least, giving ten percent of your time and energy to something unfamiliar, even risky, helps reverse or prevent the terrible effects of feeling stuck in a career rut. Yes, work-life balance is important – but what happens in one realm affects the other. Author Tony Schwartz notes that when we are energised and excited by our careers, we are more productive in all areas of life. Conversely, a repetitive daily grind leaves us starved for both energy and time. Having a Specbell allows us to return to our familiar responsibilities with a renewed spirit.
How barbells work out
Having read this far, you may be thinking that going barbell with your career is great in theory, but would never work in real life. With all the obligations devouring your time, how are you supposed to add one more? And what organisation is going to be okay with a valued member using ten percent of his or her time on something totally unrelated to the job description?
It's true that the barbell career strategy is not for everyone. However, a growing number of professionals are adopting it, though they may not give it a name. In fact, I have helped several of them successfully negotiate a barbell solution with their companies. In my next post, I will tell their stories and provide general pointers for those who might want to follow their example.
My research into this new career path is ongoing. If you're currently practicing some version of the barbell strategy, I'd love to hear from you.
Horacio Falcao is a Senior Affiliate Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD. He is also the programme director of Negotiation Dynamics, part of the school's suite of Executive Development Programmes. He is the author of Value Negotiation: How to Finally Get the Win-Win Right.
This article was used with permission from INSEAD.
When Tidjane Thiam, former CEO of Prudential (and an INSEAD alum) became the CEO of Credit Suisse, he was asked if he was equipped to do a good job since he had never worked in investment banking before. He replied, "I've studied physics and maths…there is nothing that I don't understand in investment banking".
Thiam embodies the often winding paths professionals are increasingly taking in their careers. As we move toward a sharing and on-demand economy in an already globalised world, the idea of lifetime employment with fixed skillsets is rapidly evaporating.
Until recently, people tended to stay in one job or industry for many years, if not most of their careers and employers looked for and valued employees with strong sector expertise much more than people with broad eclectic backgrounds and cross-sector experience, even if their overall profile could make them a better fit.
Now it is becoming more common for people to switch employers and industries frequently and change paths as they progress in their careers, building a “portfolio career”.
What do you want to be?
Some people are lucky enough to know what they are passionate about and want to do from an early age and can pursue it single-mindedly. But even they may have to entertain other options once their professional careers are over or they fail to achieve their ambitions.
Building a core set of skills and some sector expertise so that one does not become a "jack of all trades and master of none" is a good approach, especially as you progress through your career. However, I have found that often the knowledge and learnings I have acquired from one job or industry become equally useful and applicable in a new job in a seemingly unrelated sector. Steve Jobs said what inspired him most in the design of the transformational Apple "iProducts" was the knowledge he gained from a calligraphy class he took in college.
More importantly, the essential soft skills (and often unlearnable and uncontrollable politics) that ultimately determine one's success in his or her job such as people management (both upward and down), maturity and how to handle uncertainty and disruptions can be gained from multiple jobs and sectors and only with time and experience – there are no shortcuts.
Evolving business models and career models
In terms of holding multiple or "a portfolio" of jobs, most people throughout history had to do it just to make ends meet. Under communism, many had to look outside their “official” job in the underground economy to earn money and access rationed or prohibited goods. It is only with industrialisation and the rise of the corporation that many have been able to pursue and become accustomed to long-term jobs in business.
However, with the "internet of things" and sharing economy, which has drastically reduced the cost of information and outsourcing, business models and thus workers need to adapt. We are forced to move to the portfolio approach with jobs and careers. One’s skills can become irrelevant or obsolete quickly and companies are less loyal than ever to their employees. Even if companies implement policies to retain talented workers, one can be fired any time due to a restructuring, especially as one moves up the corporate ladder, where there are fewer chances to dodge sideways in times of difficulty. The higher up the rungs and older you get, the harder it is to find a similar job in level and pay once you leave a job or get laid off – especially if your skills can be easily replaced or outsourced to younger, cheaper workers.
The new-economy requires people to not just learn new skills as they age, but to monitor the market for new opportunities. With the rise of project- and contract-based work enabled by technology platforms that cater to independent consultants and freelancers, more and more people are able and likely to be self-employed, offering services to a wide range of customers and managing their own company - taking on activities like sales, marketing and accounting which are delegated to specialists in a corporation.
All this means less stability and employment protection, although many self-employed people grow to value the autonomy, flexibility and variety in their work so much that they are willing to trade security for independence. They are also more likely to build and nurture professional networks that last. And because they have to be more sensitive to the winds of the market and continuously adapt to their clients, they also hedge themselves from becoming entirely irrelevant and unemployed. Research suggests that countries and companies with more flexible work cultures are more innovative and creative. The career path should also adapt to this new world order. Only the innovative will survive.
Pan Pan is Founder and Managing Partner of Pantéra Ventures. She has an MBA from INSEAD ('03). You can follow her on Twitter @pansquared.
This originally appeared in INSEAD Knowledge on August 27, 2015. Used with permission.