Friday, November 15, 2019

Cultivating many options

In life and career, it's critical that you always have multiple options available to you at any given time. In other words, you want to have a viable backup plan in place. But, I would contend, you don't want just one backup plan. You want at least a couple. Maybe even a few. And you want them always ready to go, at a moment's notice.

Case in point: as you may know from reading prior posts here at this blog, I have always worked in what I generically call the business world - a collection of different private sector roles over the years. It wasn't until only a year and a half ago or so that I started to explore possibilities in K-12 education, specifically high school -level education. One of these days, I would really love to teach at the college level. That's the ultimate end goal for me. But even though I'm passionate about, and excited to be a part of, the world of education, I continue to keep my eyes, ears, and mind open for new opportunities in business and industry. I continue to network and maintain my relationships with an extensive variety of business professionals and subject matter experts, and I keep my resume updated and ready to go if needed. I seek out opportunities to learn new skills and to strengthen skills I already have. Furthermore, I maintain a small amount of freelance marketing work in addition to my full-time work in education. I can always ramp up this freelance work if I want or need to.

Likewise, the same goes with my investing and retirement planning. It's important to cultivate multiple streams of income - multiple strategies and a diverse variety of solid investments - so that if one or more begin to falter, others can pick up the slack.

So that's what I mean when I talk about cultivating multiple options. You never know when you may need to turn to them, or shift them from playing a secondary role in your life or career to a primary role, or vice-versa. It's always wise to have a few viable backup plans ready to go at a moment's notice.

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