Ups and Downs

I was clearing up the desktop of my computer this morning and came across this table outlining the pros and cons of having a self-directed portfolio career.  Seeing as I haven't posted anything for a while, I thought I would share it

Upsides	Downsides
-       you can take the afternoon (or even the day) off to spend with your lover -       no one person is your boss…..i.e. no line manager -       you can work a lot and earn plenty money, or work not very much and have more time off -       sometimes great variety of work -       you only have yourself to blame	-       no colleagues to chat to on a daily basis -       no security -     quiet periods can be rather anxiety-inducing -       it can be difficult to know if you are doing well or not (no performance appraisal) -       you have to do your own goal-setting -       sometimes no variety of work! -       you only have yourself to blame!

The Mess on the Desk

I have so many interests that sometimes it's quite difficult to see the wood for the trees... especially on my desk, which typically has several piles of papers  - journal articles, pages from magazines etc that I am in the process of reading (or intending to read).  But sometimes this eclectic disorganisation actually pays off.

The other day, during a desk tidying exercise, I found an article that I had torn out of The Psychologist magazine in February called From Brain Scan to Lesson Plan.  I put it in my bag to read on the train on the way to meet a friend in London, so later in the evening, something he said prompted me to talk about some of the ideas in the article.  One of the things he was interested in was the proliferation of 'neuromyths' in the world of teaching, such as the use of the concept of preferred learning styles to improve learning outcomes (for which there is little scientific evidence).   He asked me if I would be prepared to give a talk to the music teachers he works with at Newham Music Academy about the Psychology of Learning as part of their professional development programme.

I agreed in a fairly tentative way, because I wasn't initially sure exactly what I could discuss that they would find interesting (and useful), but then I started doing some research into the links between neuroscience and learning, and strangely enough, this led me to articles about how neuroscience studies have shown that the study and practice of music may actually enhance an individual's general ability to learn.  Bingo! Now I have a sense of what the talk could be about.  What's more, I realised that I could also link this to studies about improvisation, as much of this work has focused on jazz musicians.

It encourages me to keep up my habit of saving articles of interest, and also to be less bothered about the state of my desk!

Life is Busy!

I enjoy writing, I really do! But somehow, writing blog posts has not (yet) become part of my routine.  There always seem to be so many other things to do - play the piano, mess about on Facebook, clear up the back yard, walk a friend's dog along the beach, speak to a business colleague about a potential project, read up about the 4-hour body, pop to the shops, chat with my god-daughter on-line, send out invites to next week's Hee-Ha's gig, think about planning for a Leadership Event Leadership Event for September, laugh at Private Eye cartoons, re-sign up for the BPS Directory of Chartered Psychologists, work out how to pay my tax on-line, download some articles about using Improvisation in Business, listen to radio 4 news .... that's what I have done today, and it's only 7.30pm - perhaps I really am busy after all!

A Note about Polymathy

Yes - it is a word!

 I just came across an excellent article about polymathy, what it means to be a polymath and how one might go about becoming one. 

Here is an excerpt:
The word itself comes from Ancient Greek, poly meaning 'many', and mathanein meaning 'to learn'. In many ways, it is fitting that Ancient Greek should be the root of the word, as many of the greatest polymaths were Greek.

A polymath, then, is someone who is particularly knowledgeable in many subjects, and the word is most frequently attached to people who have excelled in more than one field of intellectual or artistic endeavour. However, it is not clear just how many fields one must excel in, nor the extent to which one must excel, before one call be called a polymath. Some people hold that a strong interest in a wide variety of fields is enough to earn this most prized epithet, while others would reserve it for a few truly great achievers.

Other people, however, argue that being a polymath is not a state of being, but a state of becoming. Being a polymath is not what one knows now, but what one desires to know. Not a matter of intelligence, but a matter of intellectual and creative ambition and curiosity.


I think I agree with the final paragraph
 

What's It All About?

 I first read about the concept of the ‘portfolio career’ when I was studying for my masters degree in occupational psychology in the early nineties.  It was in a book by management theorist Charles Handy – I can’t now be sure which one – but it’s likely that it was “The Age of Unreason” which was published in 1989 and still has a place on my bookshelf.  At that time, I was fascinated by Handy’s writing.  I suppose because he wrote about organisations and work – the area I had chosen to study – but also because he was (and still is) an ideas person.  What he did best was to look around him at the existing situation and then notice all the subtle shifts and changes and then formulate predictions of how things would look in the future. 

The concept of the portfolio career is pretty simple – it is about having a working life that is made up of many different elements.  Some of these will be in the form of paid work (either waged or feed) and some of it will be free work.  The proportions of these types of work will vary to make up a balanced whole. 

Either by accident or design (I am not sure, and will discuss this in later posts), I now have a portfolio career.  However, I am not entirely happy with the term, as I think it suffers from the same problem as the notion of ‘work-life balance’ – the idea that one’s life is divided between that which is work and that which is non-work.  As a portfolio worker, that distinction quickly becomes blurred, so I have opted for ‘Portfolio Life’.

So there you go – that’s the explanation of the title for the blog.  I plan to write about the challenges associated with managing the portfolio and related topics that crop-up as I go along.

In The Age of Unreason Handy predicted that we would all become portfolio people.  That may be true, but it hasn’t happened yet.  However, there are an increasing number of people of all ages who, for many different reasons, have eschewed the idea of a traditional career path for a more flexible lifestyle.

Next time I will write about the elements that make up my portfolio life.

Coming Soon.....

....honest!

I will post my first entry next week.  For now here's a beautiful photo taken near Brighton last weekend