July Retrospective: Back in July 2014, I wrote a daily series exploring the realities of navigating the creative economy. Twelve years later, looking back at these entries (and my original awful hand-drawn illustrations!), I’m struck by how the core truths of a creative career remain completely timeless. Each day this month, I’m opening up the archive to share these foundational lessons—with a few modern reflections layered in. 

If you’re a new creative graduate looking to find your footing in the creative economy, a Gen X looking to pivot into a creative business, a side-hustler or someone who just wants to up their creative business game, there’s something for you in this series. Just don’t judge my drawings 😉

Portfolio Career

There are many advantages to having multiple strands to your career – it allows you to use multiple skills/strengths and it also helps to diversify your income through having multiple income streams.

If one income stream is moving slowly, another one might be doing better. This helps ease your cash flow problems.

Multiple strands bring more pleasure too – giving you more ways to express your creativity.  

They can also introduce you to a broader audience. You might find that customers who buy your product x, then take an interest in your service y. Or vice versa.

The late Barbara Sher, a writer I love who has influenced me a lot, talks about two kinds of people – scanners and divers.

Scanners are those who scan the horizon and find lots of things that interest them. Scanners have multiple interests or passions and find it really hard to pick just one. She has written an entire book on how to manage your career as a scanner called Refuse to Choose! A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything You Love. It’s highly recommended if you recognise yourself as someone with multiple interests. It has many practical applications of how to give permission to yourself to pursue multiple interests and many examples of how to manage a portfolio career.

Divers are those who have a single interest and want to dive as deeply as possible into it. If this is you, great! Go for it! It’s important to play to your strengths. If you love one thing, and it’s all you want to do, then I encourage you to go after it with all guns blazing. It’s still worthwhile looking for multiple income strands from that one thing in order to increase your revenue and smooth out your cash flow.

Whether you are a scanner or a diver, it’s advisable to have multi-strands. The difference will be whether they are all centred around the same subject or embrace multiple subject areas. 

Don’t let anyone tell you that one is better than the other.

I will say that multi-strands around the same area is probably easier to manage; but if your heart tugs you in multiple directions, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t follow multiple interests. It just takes more planning and more juggling – but is doable.

Is it possible for a mother to raise more than one child?
Of course.

It’s also possible for an artist to raise multiple artistic children.

It starts with having a really good plan. So put pen to paper and work out how you will do it.

Action – What strands do you have to your creative career? Are there too many? Not enough? Or just right? Take a look at how you could have at least a couple of different income streams coming into your creative business. Build them into your plan.

Use the comments box below to tell me about your portfolio career or career strands.

Longevity in a creative career isn’t accidental—it’s built on strategy.

While the landscape shifts, the core principles of thriving as a creative freelancer haven’t changed. For deeper, modern frameworks on building a sustainable creative practice:

• Read the Book: Looking for a step-by-step field guide to building a resilient career in the creative economy? Pick up my recent book The Thriving Creative: Successful Freelancing in the Creative Economy available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and from my publisher Routledge.
• Stay Connected: Join my community and to receive the complete 31-day hand-drawn playbook as a single PDF at the end of the month. Sign up below.