The Human Hub: Diversification and Purpose

Dear 2024, thank you for bringing into early stark focus just how tricky the world is at the moment.

Yes we’d like to put our heads in the sand, but we know that way paralysis and fear lies. So instead, we’re going to embrace the feelings, remember our personal and ethical purpose, and continue to create, innovate and act for positive impact.  

Our themes for the start of 2024 are diversification and purpose – and specifically, diversification with purpose.  

Diversification – it’s a term often used with reference to investment strategies, where by mixing a variety of investments within a portfolio you can potentially manage risks better and mitigate fluctuations – both in terms of asset types and over different timeframes for returns. For our purposes, we consider it more of a strategic tactic – think about being advised not to ‘put all your eggs in one basket’, or even ‘all work and no play makes xx a dull person’. It’s a riff on the concept of slow-motion multitasking as well, where you have a variety of topics and types of work/creative output that you dip into so that your brain has diversity in perspectives through which to spark innovation. 

Purpose doesn’t really need a definition – I think perhaps we need more to understand that the most resilient forms of purpose are those which reflect our individual ikigai – a passion that gives value and joy to life. You may have seen diagrams that highlight the 4 ‘rules of ikigai’ – your passion (what you love), your vocation (what you’re good at), your mission (what that world needs) and your profession (what you can be paid for). Alignment or overlap of those 4 enables you to clearest sense of connected purpose, but many of us can still have a passion that gives value and joy to our lives that doesn’t align with our current profession!

Diversification with purpose heralds the warning that spreading yourself too thinly isn’t that great a strategy either – just as trying to solve many problems on many fronts often leaves us feeling we’ve failed on all. Yes, we can care about many things – gender rights, freedom from religious persecution, equity, environmental protection, biodiversity, our mortgage payments, the future of our children, how we’ll pay for our retirements. But trying to act on all of them, all of the time, will stress us out and let the anxiety in.  

We see and feel that often in the environmental space – for example, diving into the depths of how close we are to tipping over planetary boundaries resulted in me having the ‘climate change blues’ for months, and it took a lot of stern talking to myself and strategizing on what I could do to contribute to positive movements to drag myself out of that.  

We have to strike that balance of what keeps us contented, cared for and joyful today, and what gives us passion, security and hope for the future. 

And one way to do that is to develop a personal strategy – what do you care about in the long term (10 years plus), what can you do about that over the medium-term (in the next 2-3 years) and how do you curate your day-to-day (short term, the next few months) so that you have the resilience, energy, insights and clarity to align those things over time. I use this process myself and with clients and colleagues.

Putting ourselves in the driving seat of our own strategy gives us ownership of our passions and our ability to positively impact others. And that surely brings a sense of peace, value and joy.

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