THE PORTFOLIO LIFE: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger than Your Business Card by Christina Wallace

(Balance, April 2023)

“In a turbulent world, this is a guide to leading a balanced life. Drawing on her background as a serial entrepreneur, Christina offers actionable advice to help you anticipate—and navigate—disruption.”
―Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast Re:Thinking

What Color Is Your Parachute? meets Out of Office in this inspiring, practical playbook to achieve sustainable work-life balance while optimizing your happiness, personal growth, and bank accounts.

Pouring yourself into a single full-time job is the riskiest move you can make. Your parents’ advice to focus on one career path? It doesn’t work anymore, for reasons ranging from recessions to student loan debt, the gig economy, climate disasters, and a global pandemic (to name a few). We need a dramatically different relationship with work, one that allows us to define ourselves beyond our paid labor.

The answer? A Portfolio Life. An anti-hustle, pro-rest approach to work-life balance, a Portfolio Life is built on three tenets:

You are more than any one role or opportunity.
Diversification will help you navigate change and mitigate uncertainty.
When (not if) your needs change, you can and should rebalance.

In The Portfolio Life, Harvard professor, serial entrepreneur, and self-described “human Venn diagram” Christina Wallace adapts tried-and-true practices from the business sector to help you eschew the cult of ambition and experience the freedom of building the flexible, fulfilling, and sustainable life you want. Drawing on research, case studies, and her own experience, she walks you step-by-step through the process of designing a strategy for the long haul. Because you deserve rest, relationships, and a rewarding career—not someday, but today. After all, you only live once.

Christina Wallace is a self-described “human Venn diagram” who has crafted a career at the intersection of business, the arts, and technology. She is currently a Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurial Management at Harvard Business School and an active startup mentor and angel investor. She was previously cohost of The Limit Does Not Exist and co-authored New To Big (April 2019, Currency). A serial entrepreneur, Christina spent a decade building businesses in fashion, media, and edtech, including a venture inside the American Museum of Natural History focused on getting girls into STEM. She was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and began her career at the Metropolitan Opera. Christina holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and theater studies from Emory University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, Chas Carey, and their two children, Arden and Sebastian. For more on Christina visit christinawallace.com and portfoliolife.com.

Filed Under: Personal Finance & Business, Self-Help & Health Tagged With: ,

NEW TO BIG: How Companies Can Create Like Entrepreneurs, Invest Like VCs, and Install a Permanent Operating System for Growth by David Kidder and Christina Wallace

(Crown Currency, 2019)

In NEW TO BIG, serial entrepreneurs David Kidder and Christina Wallace reveal the Bionic blueprint for igniting growth revolutions inside established companies—funding portfolios of startups and monitoring their progress as they grow from new ideas into big businesses.

When David Kidder was invited to speak at GE’s annual leadership conference in 2012, he posed a rather unexpected question from the stage down to then-chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, “How many $50 million companies did you launch last year?” The answer was zero. But Immelt, rather than being angry or offended by the radical candor, admitted to the 700 leaders in attendance, “That was the most important question in the thirty-seven years of this conference.”

The fact is, as Kidder shows in NEW TO BIG entrenched thinking and outdated bureaucracy is at war with new ideas. Established companies are skilled at growing big businesses into even bigger ones. Entrepreneurs and early-stage investors, on the other hand, are skilled at discovering new opportunities and turning them into big businesses. New to Big combines the best of both worlds, introducing established companies to the methodology, tools, and systems of entrepreneurship and venture capital. It’s creates a way of working that they call the Growth Operating System.

NEW TO BIG is designed to unpack the Growth Operating System that veteran venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs use to discover the future in the face of the unknowable. Because even most bets placed by VC’s fail, more than 80 percent of the time. That is why you need a portfolio of investments and a growth board to measure the progress of each business, ensuring bad ideas die and good ideas grow.

For more about Bionic please visit bionicsolution.com.

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