Dealing With Your Career’s “What-Ifs”…

So what’s better?  Being really good at one thing?  Or sorta good at five things?

To preface what I’m about to talk about, let’s take a look at the ever-so-popular construction industry.  Let’s pretend you worked in the construction industry and you were damn good at it, too.  Your dad worked in construction and so did his dad.  But now, the economy has weakened, people are losing the homes they own, and they can’t afford to buy brand new homes, which means: no demand.  Home builders can’t continue building new homes if they can’t sell the ones they just built.  It’s a concept of simple economics.  Well now you’re out of a job and it’s not like you can just go down the street and get a job with another company.  Nobody is building homes.  The construction industry is stagnant and the jobs don’t exist.  Unfortunately, you’ve put all your time and effort into construction and you’re really not that good at anything else.  Now what?  This is why Professional Diversification is so important.

Now let’s go back and look at my initial question.  Is it better to be really good at one thing or sorta good at five things?  I’m sure you could argue this either way, but for the purpose of this blog, we’re going to assume that it’s better to be good at a lot of things.  To help visualize this concept, let’s pretend we own a portfolio of stocks.  The most important part of running a successful portfolio is diversification, right?  Why do we diversify our portfolios?  To minimize the risk.  This same concept works for our Professional Portfolios.  The more skills and abilities we add to our portfolio, the less risk we should encounter.  Risk, in our case, is represented by potential unemployment for long periods of time, like our construction worker example.  We don’t want that to happen.

Take a few minutes to think about your career’s “what-ifs.”  What if you lost your job tomorrow?  What would you do?  Do you have a backup plan?  Stay tuned, next time I’ll be discussing the principles of your Professional Portfolio and lay the foundation to get you started.

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