“A one-dimensional identity puts all of your happiness in one basket. Fill your life with friends, family, lore, love, books, hobbies, exercise, art. Diversify your identity and you’ll always have something to be happy about!”
– Sahil Lavingia
“Just like you’re advised to diversify your financial portfolio to manage risks, it’s important to diversify your life. Work is one part of it. But what, outside of work, makes you, you?”
– HBR Ascend
Chances are that you have come across these quotes in one form or the other. Anyway, what do I think of these quotes? I think…our lives are largely centred around working and what we do for a living. For regular 9-5ers, we spend most of our productive hours every day working and commuting to/from work. For entrepreneurs, rumour has it that they spend even more time working than the rest of us. Do they really? Anyway, story for another day. But the point is that we’ve heard the advice in the quotes in so many different variants, but the central message remains the same – diversify! I understand the overall point, but this particular piece of advice seems “a bit” (read: “a lot”) disingenuous really. Why do I say so?
Well, I would very much like to diversify my life and ergo the sources of my happiness, but we live in a capitalist society and what this means is that except you are a trust fund baby, you have to do some sort of work to at least get by. And the work takes all your time! Where then is the time to diversify – as everyone is quick to admonish?! Anyway, since work takes such a huge part of our lives, we have to squeeze in all our other interests in what little time we have left. Time we should be using to rest oh. But anyway, there are benefits to trying! And try we must! I assume you already know why your work must not be your entire identity. But just in case you don’t know (yikes), let me summarize quickly: “diversifying your identity is a personal risk management strategy which helps ensure that you can derive joy and happiness in different parts of your life at every given time” Yes, feel free to quote me! If your life is one-dimensional and things aren’t just looking up in that dimension for any reason at all, then your entire life is suddenly a mess – just like that. Is that what you want for yourself?
So, what should you do? I like the way Sahil put it in the quote: Fill your life with friends, family, lore, love, books, hobbies, exercise, art. Diversify your identity and you’ll always have something to be happy about!” Here are some tips on how we can achieve this.
1. Make work fun: Don’t always think in terms of what you can do outside work. Think of how to infuse fun activities into your work itself. This may be by introducing team-building activities for you and your team or even personal challenges for yourself. You can channel these activities around your interests. Feel free to search the interwebs for fun exercises you can do at work!
2. Let work stay at work: This one can be a bit tricky. Of course, you can work on “one or two” after work hours or during the weekend. But you know you have gone overboard when you can’t tell the difference between when you are on the clock and when you aren’t. When you aren’t on the clock, spend time on things which interest you and are not related to work. Let work stay at work.
3. Use your vacation days: This one goes without saying, yeah? Vacation allows you to take time off work whilst you continue to get paid. Yay! So don’t ever try to flex with “I don’t ever go on leave”. And when you do go on vacation, make sure you stay off work! This is the time to explore your interests, pick up new hobbies, learn some soft skills, spend time with loved ones and do all the other things working full time does not give you time to do.
4. Join communities: This one is major (in my opinion). Being an active member of vibrant communities that interest you is a surefire way of diversifying the sources of your happiness and your life generally. And guess what, if you don’t feel like you fit in any communities, you can create one! For example, if you like fitness or food or music or lifestyle generally, you can create a community of people who love these things, and you can always come up with activities around these interests. The possibilities are endless really.
Remember – if you diversify your identity, you will always have something to be happy about! See you next time!
