Too many interests? How about a portfolio career?

Ever find yourself pulled between multiple I-wanna's as you look at potential career paths? I wanna do this - no wait! I wanna do that!

If it's hard to choose, take heart. You may not have to. Maybe what you really need is a portfolio career. What's that? According to this article, it's part of a growing trend...

Gold is one of a growing number of professionals who are opting out of the traditional one-job track. Instead, they are crafting a portfolio of careers comprising multiple part-time jobs that, when combined, are equivalent to a full-time position. The number of people pursuing these dual - or even tri - track careers has doubled in the past couple of years, said John A. Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an the outplacement consulting company.

Before I discovered my Passion Catalyst work, I had my fingers in multiple pies. A bit of my income came from this. A bit more came from that. I seemed to have an inability (not to mention a complete lack of desire) to focus on any one thing.

When I heard about the idea of portfolio careers, I thought, "Whoohooh! I'm not scattered - I'm a Portfolio Careerist! I belong to a category now!"

Even since discovering the focus of my current path, my work has had a portfolio career flavor. There is one core focus - helping people create careers that energize and inspire them - but I do that in multiple ways. I'm a coach, a writer, and a speaker. And these days I'm feeling increasingly drawn to developing more products to help people along that path.

For me, having that central focus has played a key role in shaping my portfolio career. For others, as the article describes, the focus might be more diverse.

This alternative approach to work isn’t just about cobbling together a patchwork of freelance gigs, but rather is a distinct career path that allows people to combine their interests and not be seriously penalized in the process. “You want to try to find a combination of things that work well together like writing, teaching, speaking and consulting,” said Marci Alboher, who calls these multipronged careers “slash careers” in her book One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success. Alboher said she knows successful portfolio careerists who have become both a pilates instructor and an art dealer; an attorney and a minister; a psychotherapist and a violin-maker; and a teacher, dancer and puppeteer.

How about you? If you were to create a portfolio career, what would it look like?

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Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM