I was chatting with a friend and colleague in Vancouver yesterday about this notion of a “Portfolio Career” and how it fit for me.
Wayne made a comment about the great thing about portfolios, like those artists carry, is that the stuff inside isn’t linear. Thanks, Wayne, that got me thinking again.
Wayne’s right. We tend to think of careers as linear beasties.
Thinking back to my former employer, a great company by the way, but a tad linear. I remember a terrific client of mine, an engineer named Joe, who was always bitching about the company’s “management ladder and technical stump!” Joe was right. Try as the company might, management types were always more valued than us technical types. And, they always seemed to take an approach that was linear, shall I say it, “in the box”.
For those of us who are unconventional, artistic, creative, ‘outta-the-box’ types, life is anything but linear. We respond to intuition, to our Muse, to what our gut tell us. We jump on an idea. Get immersed in it. Love it. Or, throw it away. We’ve been called irresponsible, flaky, lazy, slobs, you name it.
Why? Cause we see the world from a different place. A different plane. With a different lens.
That’s not better. Or, worse. It’s just different.
That’s why we follow non-linear careers. If people bothered to look they’d see there’s a constant thread, a theme, to what we do. It comes from pursuing our passion(s).
That’s why it’s time for a different approach to careers.
And, approach I use with my creative, unconventional clients. It’s non-linear, based on both problem-focused and solution-focused strategies, and driven by intuition.
I don’t know what to call my approach! Any suggestions?
