Friday's Five ✋ #421

Portfolio Life

Happy Friday! ☀️

My week had a light schedule and I am glad I planned it that way. A nasty cold took me down on Saturday and kept me mostly in bed and home until slowly regaining energy on Tuesday. A few calls here and there, some errands left and right, and the book shelf I brought from Berlin finally mounted to a wall in my office.

What I’m reading 📖

Shortly after starting our coaching company in 2017, my colleague Hugo introduced me to the idea of a portfolio life. Until then, I thought as myself as someone signing up for one mission, one team, one focus. Hugo helped me shift perspective and think of a life that has multiple independent but closely connected components: a portfolio. I loved the idea and to think about what those components are: which ones to keep, which ones to add, and which ones to remove. It created a sense of relief to allow myself to make it my mission to support multiple teams, add a few passion projects, invest time for my personal development, and dial up or down my focus depending on my energy levels and interests. Just like an equlizer. This week, when I saw the title of Iwana Johannsen’s essay, I smiled: The five pillars of work: how to transition from a job to a portfolio career.

What I’m listening to 🎧

Durin the pandemic, just like for many others, our work shifted from mostly offline to fully online work. We spoke a lot about making the experience of full day online workshops more bearable by adding fun and quirky things to lighten the mood. One of the things I added in my session was instrumental background music during silent reflection exercises. That’s when I first discovered Khruangbin, a band whose name I can’t pronounce correctly to this day. It remains the single most-played band I’ve played in the background since our work shifted back to in-person workshops. Last Friday, the band released a new studio album and this one too is excellent.

What I’m watching 📺

Vince Gilligan created two iconic tv shows which I would count into my all-time favorite shows: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Gilligan is back with a new show, this time for Apple, which stars Rhea Seehorn who we know from BCS. Two episodes in, Pluribus really is a trip–in a good sense. Post-apocalyptic, deeply human, weird, and definitely thought-provoking. A review I saw started with the sentence: “It takes some chutzpah to make television like this.” Watch the trailer.

What I’m thinking about 🧠

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius

What else?! 💯

People who know me well know that I love sparkling water. For a few weeks now, we’ve had Something & Nothing at our house and cucumber is our favorite.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

David

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