Portfolio Career - Well-Being

The most important part of a Portfolio Career, for me, is the ability to choose the components of the portfolio. Like I've mentioned before, you would only choose things that you enjoy and that bring you a reward. This would in turn create a contentment in your everyday life, and you would really start to enjoy life.

Another term for this is 'Well-Being', and there has been a book called Well-Being by Tom Rath and Jim Harter which explains the factors that go towards achieving it.

Gallup, as in the company that run Gallup Polls etc., have analysed statistically the components that go in to well-being. They have concluded that there are five key areas:

Career Well-being, the job, or what you do each day.
Emotional Well-being, your relationship with loved ones.
Physical Well-being, your fitness, your health
Financial Well-being, how comfortable you are, having enough to support your lifestyle
Community Well-being, what sense of belonging that you have with a group of people.


Each of these in equal volume will work towards an overall sense of Well-being. Interestingly, 66% are perfectly happy with one of these, but only 7% are happy with the balance across all five.

This directly applies to what I am trying to do with this whole journey into a Portfolio Career. I want to improve my Career Well-being, and Financial Well-being, whilst maintaining the others.

When I read about this, it really resonated with my purpose. So much so that I am going to draw up a kind of Balanced Scorecard, in which I will list the activities that I do currently and allocate them into one of the five pots. I will then score these and calculate totals.

Then I will estimate a level that I am aiming to reach for each pot, calculate the gap, and plan what to do about it. I am hoping that most of the work that I am doing at the moment will go along way to plugging that gap, but it may pull out something that I have taken my eye off.