One of the things I was repeatedly taught when I was in business school at University was the importance of diversification.
Of course, the idea is that if you have yourself invested in many things or many projects, if one of them fails it doesn't mean everything you have goes down your tubes. It's basically a variation on the old "don't put all your eggs in one basket" truism.
But there are definitely both pluses and minuses to diversification.
As I've written about many times before, I tend to have my fingers in many different pies, and — in fact — the work life in our household is something we call "Patchwork Economics," which is made up of having many small businesses running together at the same time.
It's a nice idea, and in a perfect world it would work out really well!
But one of the things that often happens is that you end up with not enough time to give sufficient attention to each project to make it successful. And so, you end up with the outcome of your efforts to diversify actually becoming "diWORSEify" instead, because nothing is individually doing particularly well... because it's not getting the attention it needs.
To use a bit of a metaphor, it's like saying you're going to specialize in "tech stocks"... AND "alternative energy stocks,"... AND "emerging industry stocks." There isn't enough hours in the day to be an expert on all three!
How that works out in practice is that I end up getting into something and end up thinking to myself "this would do really well if only I had more time!" But then I come to the realization that I don't have more time and that I have to abandon what I'm doing in midstream because something else is screaming for my attention.
And that is definitely when you face the important decision that the many things you're involved in actually aren't such a great idea... and a change of strategy is needed.
Recently, I had to take a long hard look at that particular conundrum, and I eventually came to the (reluctant) conclusion that trying to find a "middle way" solution might be a good idea.
In this case the middle way was to "do three things" and let the rest of them go. I don't remember exactly where I got the three things idea from but I think it was from watching a YouTube clip where somebody was pointing our that the most things we humans can realistically hope to do successfully at the same time is three.
So I'm going to give that a try for a while. I wrote a little bit about this a while back, and the plans are coming together in a more tangible way now.
It's important that this change of direction works out because we are very much "scraping bottom," these days.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2023-07-28 23:45 PDT
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