Choosing Your Life’s Portfolio

To plan and execute corporate strategy, executives work through a series of questions to determine how their businesses can succeed. You can use a similar process to figure out how to live a meaningful life. We've created this seven-week series to show you how. You can start here.

Corporate strategy is about making choices between options: Should we keep our current portfolio, diversify, focus more on one area, acquire a company, or enter a new market? In life, the equivalent questions are: What happens if you?continue to live your life the way you are now? What if you change your priorities? What portfolio choices can you make? ?

If you’ve been following along with our newsletter for the past five weeks, and have read the article on which its based, you’re well equipped to answer these questions. (You can start from the beginning here.) Consider the definition of a great life you outlined in week one, your purpose identified in week two, and your vision described in week three, and brainstorm ideas for how you might realize them. Think about the strategic life units you identified as needing more attention in week four and how you can improve satisfaction or reallocate time there. Consider what you learned from the benchmark analysis in week five.??

Now write out a long list of potential changes and actions — small and large — and then select several you are ready to commit to. For example, you might choose reconnecting with three friends from school and committing to a sleep schedule, volunteering at a local homeless shelter, or dedicating a half hour to learning or networking every day. To make time for these new priorities, you’ll also need to find ways to reduce, outsource, or bundle existing activities, or make them more efficient through productivity strategies and tools.??

Next week we’ll dig into how you hold yourself accountable to the choices you’ve made and measure your progress. But kudos for taking the first step toward strategic life change.??

Learn more?

5 Barriers to Career Change — and How to Overcome Them?

A Simple Way to Make Better Decisions ?

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You can read the next newsletter in this series here.