“You have a portfolio career.”
“A what?”
That was my honest reaction, and even though I did not know exactly what the words meant, I suspected it was not a compliment. The person who said it was kind about it and explained that it was neither good nor bad, only a description of how I work: architect, university instructor, and blogger, with slashes in between.
I still spent the next few weeks hoping the person was wrong, and the longer I thought about it, the less I could argue.
I have run an architecture practice for over a decade. During the pandemic, an old colleague got in touch, which led me to teaching, and I still enjoy it. The blog started years ago as a way to promote the practice, back when I had a lot of time, which is another way of saying I had no projects. It never brought in a single project, but it did help me meeting some people, also the benefits of thinking clarity, so I kept going.
The comment also reminded me of an expression I have never liked, “jack of all trades, master of none.”
I could live with the first half…it is the second part that bothered me. The “master of none” part was what I did not want to admit, because I read it as a list of flaws: no focus, unstable income, and skills that never go deep.
Over the years, as changes in work kept arriving faster for not just me, but all of us, that opinion slowly reversed, and I now think I was worried about the wrong word.
The word that deserved my suspicion was “master,” and in work where the ground keeps shifting, a portfolio career is more useful than I ever gave it credit for.
Deep expertise can make change harder
I work with a colleague who insists on meeting in person for every discussion.
He has a remarkable depth of knowledge from his years as an architect, and when we talked about his resistance to online meetings, he gave me several reasons, some of them fair.
He has a small laptop screen he has to squint at, so he cannot read people well, and being on camera feels to him like a performance instead of a conversation.
Then he said something that made me stop: “I am not good with changes.”
I related to that more than I expected, because I am not good with changes either. I have always assumed people with his depth of knowledge had it “all figured out”.
What I wonder now is whether his expertise is part of the reason, since the more years you have invested in doing something one way, the more a change feels like a loss and not only an inconvenience.
My own habit of trying things without much of a plan has never looked impressive from the outside (and also from me), but it meant I had less to lose each time something shifted, and I only recently noticed that this habit may be an advantage.
Timing matters here more than we usually admit.
The pandemic moved meetings onto screens almost overnight, and it is also the reason I ended up teaching. AI now writes my meeting notes, and it has become a regular topic when colleagues and I discuss how to evaluate student work.
Each of these changes redefined what it means to be good at something while people were still in the middle of becoming good at it, so mastery starts to look like a finish line that keeps moving.
Building a whole career around reaching the “destination” seems like a risky plan, and I would rather ask what happens to the master when the field moves out from under them.
To be fair, I would not want a surgeon who is a jack of all trades, and some fields reward a single deep specialty for very good reasons. Someone could also argue that when AI makes broad, shallow ability cheap, deep judgment becomes more valuable, and I think that is partly true.
My point is about work where the ground keeps shifting, which includes architecture, and I will leave it to you to decide whether your own field belongs on that list.
Working harder did not make me safer
Early in my career, I worked at an architecture firm I was excited about, and I put in many extra hours alongside my coworkers.
The firm expected that kind of commitment, and we expected it of ourselves too. So when HR handed me a pink slip one day, it felt like it came from nowhere, and I took it personally. I decided it was my own professional inadequacy, when it was really the company’s business decision.
That experience changed how I think about hard work and reward.
I learned to treat them as two separate things that do not owe each other anything, which is not a comfortable lesson.
It also sounds a lot like the promise behind mastery, that if you commit deeply enough to one thing, it will protect you, and my layoff was the first evidence I had that the promise does not always hold.
Running a business has given me plenty of smaller versions of that moment: a harsh comment from a client, a fifth follow-up email that finally wins the project, or an employee I thought was happy quitting without warning.
When these happen, I learn to not dwell on the outcome and instead look for the next problem that has shown up. Whether that is resilience or only a habit of not looking back for too long, I honestly cannot tell.
What one job title would never show me
In the classroom, I try to explain design ideas using the real dollar amount and the real schedule behind a project, and with those questions, the project viability comes into focus.
In addition to creating a well designed building that serves the community, but we also discuss who/how the project is going to be constructed, if at all.
One student’s high rise building in single family residential would take years of zoning amendment change which translates into construction delays and also the budget overrun.
Running architecture practice pushes me to check student projects against real issues such as budget/ schedule, and those questions forces me to explain the reasoning out loud to people who do not already share my assumptions.
It works in the other direction as well. Ideas
What I discuss in class help me to test and adjust client projects before those changes become expensive. Someone who only practiced might never have to explain why a decision works, and someone who only taught might not have a budget to defend.
So I do have depth, though it is not the kind a single specialty gives you. It came from combining roles, and my writing is where I gather all of it and think it through.
To outsiders my career can look fragmented, but the roles keep borrowing from each other, and I doubt I would have built that kind of depth if I had been busy mastering only one of them.
Back to “A what?”
I still do not know whether the person who said “portfolio career” meant it as a compliment, but I have decided to take it as one.
I spent years embarrassed by a label that turned out to be a better fit for the way work is changing than the title I was trying to live up to.
Looking back at my layoff, I suppose I should be grateful to the person who said, “we decided to let you go.” I have not sent a thank-you card yet, though 🙂
