Tag: portfolio life

Portfolio with a dominant stock

Last night, I read this post I had written shortly before I turned 29. I had embarked on a “Project thirty“, a year on project I had sponsored for myself. The plan was to do everything I had wanted to do but had never been able to, and the only condition that I had put for myself had been that I wouldn’t take up a full time job until the end of the “project”.

The project, largely speaking, was successful. It laid the bed for what was a fantastic decade of “portfolio life”, as I did several things with my time (though most of my income came from one of those things I did). I built a career as a freelance analytics ad data science consultant (which is how I made most of my money), wrote a newspaper column, became an adjunct professor, involved myself in public policy research and wrote a book.

In the middle of all this, i made time for myself to go spend a semester with my wife as she completed her MBA in Barcelona, and then followed her to London when she got a job there. It was all wonderful stuff.

And then, around the time I turned 38, partly fuelled by the pandemic, I brought my portfolio life to a close. Around then, my wife asked me what my “project forty” would be. “To stay in my job”, I had told her then. And now, that has been successfully completed.  As a bonus, according per my calculations, this is the job I would’ve stayed the longest ever in!

In any case, recently, my wife asked me the usual question once again. About what my “project” for my early forties is. She probably first asked me this a month ago or something, and I don’t think I had an answer then. And then last week, after we came back from our vacation to Tanzania, I spent 2 days at home just chilling.

My new personal computer (a 14″ M1) had arrived by then, and I spent the time setting it up, reading, writing, being on twitter and exploring cool new technologies such as Stable Diffusion and Chat GPT. It was absolutely enjoyable, those 2 days. It felt great having a non-work computer of my own (my previous one had conked 6 months back, though it had hardly been operational for a year before that). Those two days were spent like my project thirty days were. They were wonderful.

And so, by the time the tens place of my age number got its increment, I had the answer ready to give to my wife. On what my plan for my early forties is. It is “portfolio with a dominant stock”.

I really enjoyed the portfolio life I lived through most of my thirties. And want to get to a portfolio again. On the other hand, I’m in a job that I’ve settled fairly well into. And during the recent holiday to Tanzania, I also realised that it feels good to be able to spend on holidays like that without really thinking a hundred times.

So what is the solution? It is basically about having a portfolio with a “dominant stock” – the dominant stock being my job. My objective for my early forties is to continue having a full time job, but also have an interesting life on the side.

For now, what the interesting sides will be – I don’t have that much of an idea, and am likely to go back to things close to my old ones.

I want to travel a lot more.
I’m restarting my newsletter soon.
I want to start teaching once again. Part time only. Need to wing this somehow, somewhere.
Meet people regularly. Breakfasts. Lunches. Dinners. Drinkses.
I want to start playing a card game competitively. Either resume bridge or (more likely) learn something new such as poker.
I have no intention of writing another book (yet). Even if I do, it is likely to be via Substack.

It’s not going to be easy of course. Last 2 years, I’ve largely focussed on my job and family, and done little else (apart from this blog and lifting). I will need to prioritise properly, and manage my time well (something I’ve never been good at). But there is no harm putting out this goal, and in public, in the hope that having put this out will help me do better at it.

Let’s see where this goes! And any ideas are welcome.

Ends, beginnings and furniture rearrangement

Back when I was a student at IIT Madras, I would get the feeling from time to time that I needed to “resurrect my life”. The motivation for this would typically be trivial, though at times it might have been an examination or an assignment gone wrong.

And these resurrections followed a pattern – I would begin by cleaning my room, throwing out all the unnecessary papers, and getting things around me in order. Whether my life would be “resurrected” after this is questionable, but I would definitely feel better, and get on with life.

Given this background, it came as a pleasant surprise when I found that the person I had married also had a similar philosophy with respect to life resurrection. In fact, since she had never lived in a hostel room, and had access to larger quarters, her resurrection would mean rearranging furniture, and throwing out clutter from her parents’ house.

And so this became our new paradigm of resurrection. Whenever we felt we needed a new start, we would rearrange the furniture in our house. Most of the time it would be minor, but it was rare for us to go too long without any rearrangement. Along the process, we would also clean and declutter the house (my resurrection formula). Again, whether our life would thus be “resurrected” is in question, but we would feel better and get on with life.

Except when we rearranged the furniture last week. It was the first time we were rearranging the furniture in our present house since we bought it two years ago. This was mainly a function of the wife being away for most of this time, doing an MBA. Living alone, I would simply clean my desk to resurrect my life. The furniture would be left alone.

Given that we were rearranging furniture after such a long time, it was a major exercise. We called Tata Sky and got our TV shifted from our shared study to the living room. A lot of other furniture also got moved around. And the house started looking very different! We found new warmth at home, and our desire to live here for a very long time got reinforced.

While most “resurrections” have been nondescript and I’ve gotten back to living life the normal way after rearranging my desk/furniture, these resurrections are usually a time for introspection, and some rearrangements have actually led to major life changes. And as it happened, this one too has spurred what I think is going to be a major change.

Back in late 2011, after I had just quit my last full-time job, I embarked on “Project Thirty“, where I gave myself a year to do everything I’d wanted to do but had never done. I had no revenue targets for that year (2012), but had some plans. More reading. More writing. More travelling. Maybe some teaching. Maybe to set up a business.

By the end of the year, my career as a freelance consultant had taken off. Six months afterward, I got a contract with Mint to write a column for them. Meanwhile, I got associated with the Takshashila Institution, a public policy think tank. In 2014-15 I taught a full term MBA course at IIMB. And earlier this year I completed the manuscript of a book. In other words, over the last five years I’ve led a full-blown “portfolio life”.

As I ruminated in my newly decluttered study following the rearrangement (the TV and a couch had moved out), I realised that I’ve pretty much achieved most of what I set to achieve when I wanted a portfolio life. And when you have achieved a lot of what you’ve wanted to achieve, it is hard to remain motivated. And when you’re not motivated, Parkinson’s Law takes over, and you become inefficient. Work expands to fill the time available.

So I’ve decided it’s time to rebalance the portfolio, and possibly reduce the number of components. Most importantly, I’m looking to get back to the corporate world, and find a job in Bangalore. I expect this job to take the place of my freelance consulting business in my portfolio. My associations with Mint and Takshashila will remain. The book, having been written, doesn’t need so much attention now. And for reasons you’ll see soon, travel will become significantly tougher.

In moving from freelance consulting to a job, I’ll be losing volatility and uncertainty, and its associated excitement. I’ll be losing significant option value in terms of additional things I can take up. Compensation, of course, will come in the form of a steady paycheck.

And as my current portfolio comes to an end, it is also time for a new beginning. One of the reasons I’m willing to forego excitement in my professional life is that there is a new source of excitement coming up shortly. Gene propagation is happening in September (more on that in a separate post)!

While we did want to resurrect our lives (and my portfolio rebalancing decision does justify that end) when we rearranged the furniture last week, the main motivation behind the exercise was to prepare the house for the expansion in human population. Things are sometimes more interconnected than we tend to think!

Letters to my wife

As I turned Thirty Three yesterday, my wife dug up some letters (emails to be precise) I’d written to her over the years and compiled them for me, urging me to create at “Project Thirty Four” (on the lines of my Project Thirty). What is pleasantly surprising is that I’ve actually managed to make a life plan for myself, and execute it (surprising considering I don’t consider myself to be too good a planner in general).

In February 2011, after having returned from a rather strenuous work trip to New York, this is what I had to say (emphasis added later, typos as in original):

For me steady state is when I’ll be doing lots of part-time jobs, consulting gigs, where I’m mostly owrking from home, getting out only to meet people, getting to meet a lot of people (somethign taht doesn’t happen in this job), having fun in the evenings and all that

I wrote this six months before I exited my last job, and it is interesting that it almost perfectly reflects my life nowadays (except for the “have fun in the evenings” bit, but that can be put down to being long distance).

I’ve just started a part time job. I have a couple of consulting gigs going. I write for a newspaper (and get paid for it). I mostly work from home. I’ve had one “general catch up” a day on an average (this data is from this Quantified Life sheet my wife set up for me).

A week later I had already started planning what I wanted to do next. Some excerpts from a letter I wrote in March 2011:

Ok so I plan to start a business. I don’t know when I’ll start, but I’m targeting sometime mid 2012.

I want to offer data consultancy services.

Basically companies will have shitloads of data that they can’t make sense of. They need someone who is well-versed in working with and looking at data, who can help them make sense of all that they’ve got. And I’m going to be that person.

Too many people think of data analysis as a science and just through at data all the analytical and statistical weapons that they’ve got. I believe that is the wrong approach and leads to spurious results that can be harmful for the client’s business.

However, I think it is an art. Making sense of data is like taming a pet dog. There is a way you communicate with it. There is a way you make it do tricks (give you the required information). And one needs to proceed slowly and cautiously in order to get the desired results.

I think of myself as a “semi-quant”. While I am well-versed in all the quantitative techniques in data analysis and financial modeling, I’m also deeply aware that using quantitative tools indiscriminately can lead to mismanagement of risks, which can be harmful to the client. I believe in limited and “sustainable” use of quantitative tools, so that it can lead without misleading.

 

My past experience with working with data is that data analysis can be disruptive. I don’t promise results that will be of particular liking for the client – but I promise that what I diagnose is good for the client’s business. When you dig through mountains of data, you are bound to get some bitter pills. I expect my clients to handle the bad news professionally and not shoot the messenger.

I don’t promise to find a “signal” in every data set that I’m given. There are chances that what I’m working with is pure noise, and in case I find that, I’ll make efforts to prove that to the client (I think that is also valuable information).

And these paragraphs, written a full year before I started out doing what I’m doing now, pretty much encapsulate what I’m doing now. Very little has changed over nearly five years! I feel rather proud of myself!

And a thousand thanks to my wife for picking out these emails I had sent her and showing me that I can work to a plan.

Now on to making Project Thirty Four, which I hope to publish by the end of today, and hope to execute by the end of next year.

Switching Off

Since last night I’ve been terribly sick. I slept fitfully, if at all, all of last night, and I’ve been totally out of action all day today. It’s nothing particularly serious – just a bad attack of the common cold, and I expect it to take its normal course. Yet, through the day, as I’ve struggled to think, I’ve realized how hard it’s become for me of late to switch off.

When I tell people that I freelance and lead a “portfolio life”, the first question I usually get asked is if  I can separate my work and non-work lives. This is especially important since my office is just a room inside my house. Usually i say that I do it pretty well. I have some strict rules, for example – I don’t work beyond 6:30 pm. I don’t work on weekends unless absolutely necessary (this includes Saturdays when my wife goes to work). In the last six months, I use my iPad for reading, so that I don’t use my work computer for non-work purposes – so of late I don’t even switch on my work computer on weekends and holidays.

Yet, I think I have difficulty switching off, especially on an unplanned basis. I took a vacation in December, and didn’t carry my work with me (for the first time since turning freelancer I even put an Out of Office AutoReply into my email). Yet, when I got back ten days later it seemed like I hadn’t taken a break from work, and could actually continue from where I had left off before I went (this is a good thing).

I have no difficulty taking my mind off work on most weekends, and on holidays. Yesterday, for example, was a general holiday in Bangalore (on account of Makara Sankranti). I had no problem switching off. Yet, despite being terribly sick and unable to work today, it has been really hard.

The downside of a “portfolio life” is that at any point in time  there is something pending. It is seldom that all your responsibilities close at the same time, and you can declare yourself to be “free” (which is why it is important to switch off in the evenings, on weekends, etc., and take the occasional vacation irrespective of whether the “work” is “finished”). So it is very rare that you get to your desk some day and realize there is “no work” – there may be no immediate deadlines, but there is always plenty to do.

In this context, today has been hard. I realize today that the common cold not only affects you physically but also mentally – it eats into your mindspace, and doesn’t allow you to think, which doesn’t allow you to work. And when you decide to declare a holiday for yourself and not work, things you do, such as the things you read, remind you of one aspect of work or the other – another downside of a portfolio life – too many non-work activities have a connection with work. And then you feel guilty about not working.

I think I need to figure out a policy of “casual leaves” for myself, where I tell myself that it is okay to not work on certain days, despite all that is there to be done. I’ve done it for myself for scheduled holidays – such as weekends or vacations. I need to convince myself to do this for the occasional unscheduled holiday, too – days like today.