DESIGNING YOUR DESTINY
Harvard Business School’s Christina Wallace muses on the meaning of happiness, the things that truly matter in life and the tangible benefits of a portfolio career T he comment came from a classmate I hadn’t seen since graduation while I was making the rounds at my 10-year Harvard Business School (HBS) reunion, delayed two years by the pandemic: “No, I’m not happy, but is anyone actually happy?” His question surprised me. The classmate had gone on to a top management consulting firm and risen through the ranks quickly, earning the title of partner a full year earlier than his peers. He was married to a woman he had met at HBS and they had four healthy, beautiful children. From the outside, this was the version of success we had all written about in our admissions essays. He continued, “Really, is happiness even possible at this age? I’m not sure I could define what happiness would look like right now.” I parsed my words carefully: “We’re at that stage of life where the pressure adds up and can feel overwhelming at times.” He looked at me for a moment, seemingly annoyed that I hadn’t offered up my own misery in solidarity. “Be straight with me: are you happy?” he asked. “I am,” I admitted, “but then again, I didn’t follow a traditional path. I have a portfolio life.” Measuring what is worthwhile & setting priorities I can point to two moments that shaped my views on careers and life – and they both occurred at HBS. The first was the fall of Lehman Brothers in the third week of my MBA and the ensuing global financial crisis. The second was a question that renowned professor Clayton Christensen asked on the last day of his class: “How will you measure your life?” Christensen had just been diagnosed with brain cancer. At that time, he felt an urgency to talk not about disruptive innovation but, instead, about happiness and investing as much effort and focus into the things that give our life meaning as we do into our careers. “What you measure is what matters and it would be a shame to waste your life focused on things that are easy to measure, but don’t actually matter in the end,” he concluded. That sentence hit me hard. I was a pro at acing tests that I didn’t care about, eager to validate my worth through tangible achievements. It was so much easier to follow the breadcrumbs marking success that were left out in a neat row by industries such as investment banking, private equity and management consulting than to forge my own path that served my values, met my needs and accelerated my dreams.
I felt a need to find – or create – a different framework for my future, a model to help guide me through setting priorities, making trade-offs and grappling with hard decisions. I needed one that could be intentionally designed, diversified and updated as I went through different seasons of life, in a manner akin to a financial portfolio. The importance of constructing a portfolio that can pivot After a pre-MBA career in the non-profit theatre and opera world, I pivoted to entrepreneurship and spent a decade post-MBA founding and building tech start-ups while moonlighting across a range of sectors. From choral singing to podcasting, long-distance running to mountain climbing, solo world travel to creative writing, I found growth, joy, community, additional income streams and – on occasion – dates from these endeavours that accompanied my professional pursuits. When my life demanded that I allocate my time differently (as it did when my husband and I started a family), I rebalanced my portfolio to meet my changing needs. Trading the emotional and financial rollercoaster of new venture creation for the flexibility and predictability of an academic role, I returned to Harvard as a senior lecturer of entrepreneurship. Throughout it all, I used this model of a portfolio to allocate my time and attention across a collection of activities that included work but also encompassed family, creative projects, friendships and investments in my health. My portfolio would be constructed to serve the chapter of life I was in with complete permission to rebalance it when I turned a page and a new chapter arrived. I wanted to measure what mattered to me. Building lives with purpose, intentionality & flexibility One of the great joys of my role on the HBS faculty is office hours with students. These meetings are always requested ostensibly to discuss a question about class or get feedback on a start-up they are working on, but within minutes of plopping into my vacant chair the conversation always turns towards the personal. “What do I want? What does success mean for me?” Their struggles are often delivered sotto voce , as though it would be shameful to admit they don’t want ‘what the typical MBA graduate wants’. They rush to reassure me that they are still ambitious, despite their uncertainty over becoming a future CEO of a multinational corporation or managing director of a bulge-bracket bank.
36 | Ambition | DECEMBER 2024
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