How to treat your identity like your portfolio [#52]

This is the fifth part of an (at least) 5-part email series, published over the next weeks about the topic of the Portfolio Career. I’ll stop writing when I run out of material. 

• Chapter 1: What is a Portfolio Career?
• Chapter 2: How do you build a Portfolio Career? 
• Chapter 3: The Three Steps towards Multipreneurship
• Chapter 4: How I’m building my Portfolio Career 
• Chapter 5: How to treat your identity like your portfolio (You are here)

Tell me if this story sounds familiar: a startup founder successfully sells her business for a significant amount of money. Afterwards, they fall into deep depression – what Sifted calls “Exit Blues”.

To some extent, the same thing happens to founders when their startup is doing well or not so well. Their mood swings with the state of the startup. 

Why? 

Let’s take a step back.

Complete the following sentence: “Hi, I’m [your first name]. I’m a [X].” 

What’s your [X]? 

For example: Hi, I’m Dominik. I’m an entrepreneur. 

I’ve made “being an entrepreneur” part of my identity. Which in itself isn’t bad – good things happen when you take things so seriously that you identify yourself with them. 

But sometimes in life, we lose: 

• When an entrepreneur loses their startup, they lose part of themselves. 
• When an athlete gets injured, they lose part of themselves. 
• When a husband gets divorced, they lose part of themselves. 

So if someone only identifies as entrepreneur, and they lose their startup (also via exit), they lose themselves. (Which I perceive to be quite common, as building a startup does take up a ton of time and energy.) 

How do we prevent this?

The answer lies in the realm of finance: by hedging.

Hedging means you invest into diverse assets: stocks, bonds, commodities, long and short options, futures, etc. Instead of going all in, you let the statistics do the work for you and offset risks (for a more detailed explanation, check out Wikipedia. Whoever wrote this article does a lot better job than I ever could).

Just like you build up a portfolio career to hedge (or diversify) your income streams, you build up different identities to hedge yourself. 

So instead of just being an entrepreneur, be an entrepreneur and something. 

I consider myself an entrepreneur, athlete, and writer. But I also have “secondary identities” as partner, friend, mentor, mentee, and so on.

There are a lot of ways you can identify with something – but you do have to commit time to these things. If you told yourself “I’m a writer” but you haven’t written in a year, you probably wouldn’t believe yourself either.

In short: 

1. Recognize that you are more than just one thing 
2. Make time for the other things in life that give you joy and energy
3. Identify with them too

So that the next time misery strikes, you have other identities to fall back on.

Question for you: 

Do you have more than one identity?

• If so, which?
• If not, which identity would you like to take on? 

If you’d like, send me your response to this. I’m very curious. 

Quotes I like:

Charlie Munger on what a young person should look for in a career:

"I have three basic rules – meeting all three is nearly impossible, but you should try anyway:

1. Don't sell anything you wouldn't buy yourself
2. Don't for work anyone you don't respect or admire.
3. Work only with people you enjoy."

PS: If some of these ideas in this post sound familiar, it’s because this is a revamped version of a post I’ve written in 2018. Read the original here.