I manage a portfolio of approximately 100 plants in my home. Here’s the breakdown:
17% shrubs
20% houseplants
30% flowers (half annuals, half perennials)
33% veggies (tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers)
The flowers are my favorites. The veggies require the most time and attention; I grew them from seeds with my kids. The shrubs are the easiest to manage right now, but I have no idea how I’m going to “overwinter” them when temperatures start to dip below freezing. My houseplant collection is pretty straightforward now, but I’ll likely rekindle my orchid habit when the outdoor garden season ends.
I love gardening because it’s such an externally visible way of measuring your progress across a diversified set of interests. In this case, plants. Gardening is also such a neatly condensed metaphor of describing a portfolio mindset. People don’t ask too many questions about how you get your gardening done, but the end result is obvious. You have built a micro-ecosystem.
Gardening as a Metaphor for Portfolio Careers
I think about portfolio careers the same way that I think about gardening. At any moment in time, I dedicate some percent of my time toward projects in “veggie” (or startup mode) work, some percent of my time in projects that are in “shrub” mode, and some in between.
Here’s how I think about it:
Type of Plant | Plant Care Requirements | Work Analogy |
|---|---|---|
Veggies | Start from seeds, requires transplanting to containers, each with different care requirements. When in season, requires daily tending, harvesting, and feeding. | Startup mode work. Projects that require effort at the earliest stages of development and literally won’t survive without daily upkeep. |
Flowers | Mid-cycle plants; blooms can be finicky and more likely to attract pollinators (good and bad); during bloom season requires more work. | Mid-cycle work. Projects that have established some independent ability to exist on their own, may only need you to check in 1-2x/week. |
Houseplants | Lots of options, but typically involves figuring out the right microclimate and balance of light and watering. Once you know what makes the plant happy, just keep repeating the formula. | Advisory work. Projects that can transition away from more heavy-handed project work into a less frequent cadence. This is largely only possible because you’ve put in some prework to understand the discrete needs going in. |
Shrubs | Requires thoughtful longer-term pre-planting work, but once established, in theory should be the most consistent and easy to manage. | Evergreen mode. Projects that don’t need your time and attention anymore or are fully established, but maybe you still like to keep some ties to them anyway (because you like working together). |
One of the things I’ve noticed about working on many projects at once is that I tap out on “startup mode” capacity at about 50% of my time.
These are projects where I’m literally working with a team to invent something that hasn’t existed before. Right now, I’m working with the team at Decoded Futures to help invent a framework to bolster AI capacity-building efforts among education and workforce development nonprofits. This requires a lot of “startup energy” to figure out. We have a lot of questions, a lot of research, and a lot of foundational work required as we move into our first pilot phase of deployment.
Other projects I’ve taken on recently that required “startup mode” energy have been things like creating a first version of a founder network, an operating and business development framework, or a new approach for a strategic grant allocation process.
Like growing veggies, these are often the types of projects that are most satisfying to work on because there is a clear output and deliverable to your work. But because it burns so much of my operator energy, I can really only work on 1 or 2 projects like this at a time.
Tending to Your Garden
I think a lot of people with portfolio careers burn out because they take on too much of the same type of work, at the same time. This is an easy mistake to make. You realize that you are good at one thing, so you try to market yourself against doing a lot of that type of work, only to quickly realize that it’s way too much to manage.
I’ve found that a healthier approach to managing a portfolio career is to aim for a mix of different types of work. If I know I’m going to have one project bringing a lot of “startup mode” energy, then I know the better thing to do is fill my remaining project time with advisory work or less operationally intensive coaching work.
And of course, something that’s not reflected on my garden chart is the projects that haven’t even hit the pots yet. All of the pre-planning work that goes into preparing what projects (or plants) you want to grow next, what containers you need to buy, and how to build those costs into your budget. If you work independently like I do, the closest analogy to this is lead generation or diligence work for your next set of projects. I basically do this all the time.
This is why at any given point in time I have somewhere between 3-30 jobs.
It’s not exactly a straightforward answer to explain what I do. But because we work in a world where people like to neatly put others into one singular bucket, I do get asked a lot how I describe myself.
Maybe I should just start telling people that I’m a gardener.
