When I was growing up in the early 2000s, only celebrities got to be multihyphenates. Nowadays, it seems like many of my friends and I are. We’re working a 9-to-5, doing a project on the side, and documenting our journeys along the way. Some people call it chaotic, but a lot of us find it cathartic. Having multiple outlets to channel our energy and flex different muscles, be they analytical, strategic, or creative, can be extremely rewarding.
When I got my job as a management consultant, I knew it would be a challenge to figure out how to continue creating content on LinkedIn and writing opinion pieces, things I do outside of my job that I genuinely enjoy.
I know in this day and age work-life balance is damn near impossible, and I don’t strive for it. But at the same time, giving up content creation and writing opinion pieces wasn’t an option for me.
What happens when you make your job your whole life
At the beginning of 2020, I was working in commercial real estate consulting and feeling I had failed. For most of my life until that point, I equated my self-worth with how I was doing at school or at work. Because I usually did well, I was accustomed to feeling good about myself.
Working in real estate was the first time I didn’t have the answers and wasn’t sure how to get them. The reality of the job was so different from what I had learned in my real estate master’s program that, from the beginning, I felt like I was playing catch-up. I’d study my manager’s financial models and spend time on the weekends brushing up on the unique aspects of Hong Kong’s real estate market, but whenever a new problem came up on one of my projects, I still wouldn’t know how to begin tackling it.
My manager’s visible frustration and exasperation as he challenged my work and questioned my assumptions did not help. Every time this happened, all I wanted was for the interaction to be over. I wanted to shut up, let him tell me the answer, and move on. So I slowly stopped speaking up at work and started to think I had nothing to contribute.
Then the coronavirus pandemic happened, and amidst all the violence against Asians, I felt compelled to write something about Sinophobia. I got it published by CNN.
I wrote the piece at night after finishing my real estate work. Even though it was late, I didn’t feel tired. I felt the opposite, energized because I was finding my voice again after feeling I had lost it in the many meetings in which I didn’t know how to answer my manager’s questions. When the piece was published, I felt like myself again. I realized that I had worth outside of how I was performing at work. That was the moment I stopped defining myself based on my job.
It was also then that I decided I’d abandon what I thought would be a long-lasting career in real estate and look for a job that involved more writing. I didn’t want a full-time job as a writer because I didn’t want my writing to be held hostage to deadlines and a paycheck, which I suspect would have chipped away at my passion. But I did know I needed to do both.
I settled on content marketing, which had just enough writing to allow me to flex that muscle but also involved strategic thinking and implementation that I wanted to learn and master.
Make time for the things that enrich your life
In the six years since then, I’ve continued to write opinion pieces and venture into other forms of content creation. Many of these didn’t pay and were work outside of my full-time job, but I was adamant about making time for them because they made my life richer.
Having these projects outside work was like having a delicious secret that made any hurdle at work seem manageable, or at least not that big of a deal. The CEO thinks the new content marketing blog post was bad? Well, hundreds of thousands of people read my latest opinion piece. In fact, at times, I’d even leverage the portfolio of work I was building in my spare time to persuade leaders at work to trust my editorial judgment.
I was no longer seeking validation from my manager and others at work because I was building something outside it that made me realize how much I had to offer. And contrary to what one might think about outside projects being a distraction, my opinion writing actually made me better at my job as a content marketer. I was writing better, approaching work with more energy, and coming up with new ideas because I wasn’t thinking about my job 24/7.
Having lived through that, I know I’d be doing myself a disservice now if I chose to abandon all my activities outside of work.
Don’t make work smaller, make life bigger
When people ask me how work is and I tell them it’s good but busy, they often assume that I don’t have time to write anymore. They could not be more wrong. I make time for it, when I’m in the Uber to the airport or before going to bed, because like doing well at my job, writing is also a nonnegotiable. So are my LinkedIn content creation and my latest project, a video series titled Just One Question.
I’m not saying I can do it all, at least not “all” in the way society has defined it. But I can try to do everything I truly want to do. The trick is to not try to do it all at once. Monday to Friday I have to work, and I fully show up for it both physically and mentally, so I do less content creation. I write a pitch here or a draft there for an opinion piece once I’m done with work, sometimes when I’m working out, and sometimes before bed. For LinkedIn, I keep an editorial calendar, and I often write posts in a batch and schedule them up to a month in advance. That’s how I get to do everything I want to do, and be present for each and every one of them.
Full disclosure: It has been a struggle, and there have been times in the past three months when I have failed. I missed three calls I was looking forward to with people I had connected with on LinkedIn because of my job. It would be easy to resign myself to the fact that I can’t “do it all” and just focus on my job. But I won’t, and I’ll keep making an effort to carve out time for things outside of work.
The things we do in life don’t fall into neat buckets that exist separate from each other. They blend and get messy. Sometimes, as I’ve told you, we fail to make it work. But we keep trying anyway, because a life spent only doing what we have to do is smaller than the life we otherwise could have.
