You can build multiple things but not all at once
Pick a lane before you cruise down them all.
You’ve heard the term ‘focus’ before, haven’t you?
Focus is what they mean when they say ‘pick a lane and stay in it’. It’s the underlying principle of the mantra ‘do less’. An absolute necessity and yet the evilest of curses; one of the hardest things to master for the multi-passionate, creative, entrepreneurial type who wants to go a million miles an hour in a million different directions.
You’ve been here before, haven’t you?
Unable to pick a lane because you want to do burnouts down the street. Full of enthusiasm and bright ideas, impatiently trying to make your ultimate vision of working on multiple businesses, projects, income streams and creative pursuits a reality overnight.
I’ve been here before. That’s how I know that nothing truly great happens in an instant, and that that portfolios are constructed over weeks, months and years. They are only built as the byproduct of countless experiments, tests, failures, strategic moves, bold calls, nuclear decisions and brazen acts of courage. You simply cannot rush greatness, especially when that greatness involves breaking all the rules about what it means to work today.
It’s possible to build multiple things, of course. I’m proof of that fact. But it’s not possible to build them in just a moment or all at once. Building a portfolio takes time, and the best and only strategy is to pick one lane first and expand as you go.
The Portfolio Career Layering Method
The Portfolio Career Layering Method is, as it sounds, an approach to building lots of disparate or interconnected channels of work. It involves starting with one focus, and then as you achieve critical mass, expanding to another.
This is the approach I follow across all areas of my business and creative life, whether it be generating new work, developing offers, building products, writing, building my personal brand, sharing ideas or art projects. Here are the seven steps I obsessively follow.
Set your direction.
A vision is an anchor that connects you to your future life. Without one, it’s easy to get distracted by tasks, requests and invitations that simply don’t matter.
I’ve never been one for using cut outs from magazines to create a collage of my dreams, but I’ve always written them down and reviewed them regularly. I did just this after leaving my former business, and I wanted the next phase of my life to look loosely like this:
Working with startups and founders I vibed with
Doing multiple projects at once
Growing my personal profile online
Writing a book
Building a thriving community of people who were equal parts business-y and creative
Creating art
I still hold this vision tightly in my mind.
Choose one focus area.
Once you have a direction, you could choose to do a million things, but a million things does not success-make. Weighing up what to do next requires your brain, heart and gut, and assessing the trade offs between your immediate needs and your longer term goals.
When I made the decision to quit interviewing for jobs and build a one person business, I was excited and overwhelmed by the possibility. My soul wanted to travel and my heart wanted to write, and the strategic side of my brain started slicing and dicing my skills and experience into hundreds of pieces and packaging them up to sell. While I desperately wanted to do all the things, I knew I needed to bring in income, and fast. Establishing one revenue stream and banking my first dollar became the one and only goal.
Make a could-do list.
Even with a clear focus you can still be showered by a deluge of to-dos. Instead of fighting the storm, dance among it. Brainstorm all the things you could do and throw everything up against the wall.
When I went out on my own, my could-do list was endless. I’d just come off the back of 7+ years as a founder (4 years full-time) and so, without the gift of blissful ignorance, I knew what had to be done: build a website, conduct market research, design an offer, create a rate card, hone my pitch…the list goes on.
This process is important. Make a note of everything that comes to mind. Write it all down.
Identify the smallest repetitive action you can take.
Your could-do list will be endless but your time and energy isn’t. That’s why prioritisation of tasks is key. My personal philosophy is to identify the core action I need to turn into a habit, because I know that when everything’s said and done, greatness comes down to what we do each day.
In the beginning knowing that my goal was to generate income, I chose the path of least resistance. I approached startups and founders I knew personally, selling myself as a generalist who could come in and get shit done. I committed to a single habit: reaching out to at least one new cold, warm and hot lead daily.
The 90 day sprint.
The 90 day sprint involves taking the smallest action you can possibly take, every single day, for 90 days. The goal of this sprint is two fold. It’s to:
Turn your core daily to-dos into habits that become so embedded, you don’t even have to think about it
Make noise and listen for a signal about what’s working and what’s not
The early days of generating momentum are a slog, there’s no way around it. You have to show up and do tasks (like sliding into DMs, having virtual calls, taking people out for coffee and selling) that you may really not want to do. Not only that, you must continuously experiment, trial, test and listen to what the market’s saying. This takes time. Longer than you think.
Check in with yourself.
Action is only productive when it’s paired with a strong feedback loop, otherwise it simply becomes banging your head against the wall. This is why it’s so important to constantly check in on how you feel, as well as what others are saying.
The Internal check-in:
Do I wake up most days curled up in a ball of anxiety, or do I wake up most days feeling a tiny spark of inspiration?
Is the process getting easier the more reps I put in?
Have any learnings come from all my actions?
Do I feel intuitively drawn to continue?
The External check-in:
Am I receiving any market validation from my efforts?
Are my ideas, offers, products or services resonating?
Have any opportunities come to me?
Am I making money?
Change lanes.
There will be a moment when things start to change. You receive signs of interest from others. A big opportunity lands in your inbox. The work starts to feel easier. The friction slowly disappears. Rather than engaging in self sabotage and talking yourself out of doing something, that something becomes part of your routine.
This is when you’re ready to pick another lane.
For me, it took about 3 months of hustling before I landed two long term projects. Only once I’d settled into a groove did I turn my attention to the next challenge. Since then, I’ve added a few additional revenue streams to my operation:
Paid freelance writing for business and lifestyle publications
Project based startup consulting
Advisory for early stage consumer brands across beauty, fashion, health, wellness and tech
Slowly but surely I’m cruising down the street. I can see the destination lit up in my headlights.
Pick a lane before you shift up a gear
You're here now, aren’t you?
Tackling a million things, quite possibly feeling dejected at the perceived lack of progress you’re making. If this is the case because you’re spread thin across too many things, you may not be giving yourself the best shot to gain momentum, shift gears and hit top speed.
So pick a lane. Start with one. And when the friction becomes smooth, pick another. Then another. Then another. Push your pedal to the floor and careen boldly down the highway that is your one, big, textured, portfolio life.
Because you’re the driver now.
Aren’t you.
🎙️How I’m applying the Layering Method to building my personal brand:
How I have discipline around not pursuing ideas even if they ignite a spark in me [1:10]
Just because I can’t do something right now, it doesn’t mean I can’t do it later [2:07]
Applying the layering method to my writing [3:02]
The very first action I took that kickstarted my entire personal brand building journey [3:00]
When actions become habits and part of your identity [5:57]
Why I stayed in my ‘lane’ for 9 months before layering on the next challenge [6:16]
My first signs of market validation for my writing and ideas [7:30]
Getting into a weekly publishing rhythm on Substack [8:51]
The additional layers that are slowly building my personal profile [11:00]
Why later layers are a far easier to add on than early ones [14:56]
When you’re ready, here are two ways I can help:
Portfolio Career Mentoring: 1-1, personalised mentoring (with yours truly) to help you build a career that sits at the intersection of freedom, creative fulfilment, meaning and money.
The Portfolio Career Operating System: an all-in-one operating system designed to help you streamline workflows, save time and minimise burnout while focusing on the things that drive more revenue, happiness and fulfilment. The exact system I’ve used to grow my portfolio to multiple six figures across fractional, advisory, mentoring, writing and digital products. Learn more here.
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…to help you build a financially lucrative and creatively fulfilling portfolio career and life.
I truly believe that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Can you tackle 10 different things at once ? Yes.
Should you? As your piece says, No.
This is hard for creative minds to understand sometimes because there is a tendency to have overconfidence bias in our ability to want to be and do everything, all at once. Let’s Focus and choose a lane. Thanks Anna!
Another great read, Anna! My portfolio has gone through many iterations and variations over the years, but one of the things I still struggle with is knowing when to move on if something isn’t working.
How do you know if a project is worth holding on to, or when to let it go to work on something else?