How To Make A Living From Many Interests

Many Baby Boomers or encore entre­pre­neurs rein­vent them­selves from the cor­po­rate world to their own busi­nesses because they feel stalled in careers that don’t encom­pass their var­ied interests.

Unfor­tu­nately, many carry their old way of think­ing with them when they open their own shops. That’s the indus­trial struc­ture that empha­sizes you should “focus” on one role or task to the exclu­sion of every­thing else.

But today, you don’t have to focus as much, espe­cially in an encore busi­ness, which is aimed as much at explor­ing as it is in gen­er­at­ing a lot of money so you can by a lot of use­less things.

The Pur­suit Port­fo­lio
The solu­tion to this dilemma is a Pur­suit Port­fo­lio, which allows you to turn your inter­ests, or pur­suits, into streams of income.  A pur­suit port­fo­lio also con­tains an ele­ment of risk man­age­ment because, if you devise the right port­fo­lio mix, some ele­ments will pro­duce income while oth­ers are in a slump.

Here’s how to design a Pur­suit Portfolio:

1.    List all your inter­ests. Write them down, describ­ing each in about a para­graph in terms of why they inter­est you, and what you do in the area. This will allow you to look at them with a cold eye instead of through emo­tion, which is noto­ri­ously short-sighted. While com­pos­ing this list, note your expe­ri­ence, knowl­edge, and degree of inter­est. Then pri­or­i­tize which you like best.

2.    Find com­mon denom­i­na­tors. You may find that you are inter­ested in sev­eral things that all revolve around a sin­gle denom­i­na­tor – your abil­ity to analyse, predilec­tion for orga­niz­ing, or love of cre­ativ­ity, for exam­ple. These can often be clus­tered into one over­all busi­ness pur­suit. Then find the inter­ests that are truly diverse and eclec­tic, such as your love of sports. Pick the top 3 or 5 that you really want to pursue.

3.    Deter­mine how you can profit from them. This is the crux of the plan, and is also the cre­ative part, because you are fig­ur­ing out how to earn income from each inter­est. So, apply busi­ness plan­ning prin­ci­ples to each pur­suit. For each, devise a plan on how you can sell that knowl­edge, per­haps by employ­ing some of the denom­i­na­tors that you iden­ti­fied above. It may be in the form of an ebook, a sem­i­nar, or in face-to-face con­sult­ing. It may be in some prod­uct that even­tu­ally sells steadily and auto­mat­i­cally with­out much involve­ment from you.

4.    Orga­nize your pur­suits in terms of income. Like in a finan­cial port­fo­lio, dif­fer­ent pur­suits will pro­duce dif­fer­ing results at dif­fer­ing times. Some will yield quick results, and some may need a lot of seed­ing and water­ing before they pro­duce reg­u­lar income. Also, some will pro­duce steady income and some will be more spo­radic. You prob­a­bly want a mix of imme­di­ate, later, steady, and “maybe” (pos­si­bil­i­ties) busi­ness pursuits.

5.    Man­age Your Time. Because mul­ti­ple pur­suits usu­ally mean mul­ti­ple demands, you may be tempted to engage in mul­ti­task­ing. Don’t, because it means you won’t be able to devote your full atten­tion to any­thing. You can pur­sue mul­ti­ple inter­ests if you orga­nize your­self (or have some­one do it for you). Devote spe­cific time peri­ods, per­haps days, or par­tial days, for spe­cific pur­suits. Obvi­ously you want to devote most time to imme­di­ate pursuits.

Okay, I lied. There actu­ally are six steps. Con­sider Num­ber Six as a bonus.

The Bonus Step. Rec­og­nize that a pur­suit port­fo­lio is evo­lu­tion­ary and must be con­stantly re-evaluated and adjusted. So build in reg­u­lar eval­u­a­tion time.  The upside of this process is that you will also be con­tin­u­ally cre­at­ing, as you tweak this or that pur­suit because of knowl­edge you’ve gained in another pursuit.

Have a sug­ges­tion on how to make this work bet­ter? I’d like to hear it.