My Career Looks Chaotic. It's Actually a Strategy.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers has a premise that's hard to argue with: the world's best — in sports, music, medicine, you name it — have logged 10,000+ hours of deliberate practice to get there. To put that in context, that's 40 hours a week for five years. And since nobody's actually grinding 40 hours a week on a single skill, a realistic timeline is closer to a decade.

Ten years. One thing. All in.

Culturally, we've treated this kind of focus as the gold standard. Pick your lane. Master your craft. Commit forever. And for certain professions — surgeons, elite athletes — that's probably non-negotiable.

But here's a question nobody asks those athletes: what happens when they retire at 32?

Ask the professionals who had solid careers but weren't all-stars, and most of them will tell you the same thing: they felt lost. Because their entire identity lived inside one thing, and then that thing ended.

When I started my career, I bought into the single-path model completely. I'd be ambitious, work hard, climb the ladder, keep going. That's what you do.

Both by design and by circumstance, my reality has looked very different.

Today, my titles include consultant and small business owner, VP of Experience at a women's health startup, stand-up comic, content creator, Parents' Association president, and — somewhere in there — an actual parent.

When I'm honest with myself, this is exactly what I always wanted. Multiple irons in the fire. Multiple revenue streams. Multiple places to put my energy. I've never been a one-trick pony, and I've never wanted to be. The diversity of my days is what gets me out of bed.

Now, the tradeoff is real: I will probably never be the best at any single thing. The exception, maybe, being the best at doing a lot of things at once.

But here's the thing — most of us won't be the best even if we do put in the 10,000 hours. Bell curves exist for a reason. If the math already suggests you're going to land somewhere in "very good" territory regardless, why not make that work for you across multiple arenas instead of one?

For me, the portfolio career delivers in three specific ways:

Multiple interests. I get to invest in several areas I actually care about, rather than rationing myself to one. That's not scattered — that's stimulating.

Multiple revenue streams. Every single income source is unpredictable. Build enough of them and you've built a real safety net. This is the money person's version of diversified assets, applied to your life.

The ability to pivot without it feeling like a crisis. When you're already operating across different spaces, evolution is just... Tuesday. You're always adapting. Compare that to someone who's been in one industry for 20 years — a pivot feels like jumping off a cliff. For a portfolio career person, it's just a step.

The more people I work with, the more I see the portfolio career as an underrated path to stability, creativity, and — honestly — joy. Yes, you're trading the pursuit of singular expertise. But if you can make peace with being very good at a lot of things instead of the best at one, you might unlock a version of yourself that's more resilient, more interesting, and a whole lot harder to knock down.

Refusing to pick just one thing isn't a lack of focus. It might actually be the strategy.

What does your portfolio look like? I'd love to hear how you're building yours.