The Portfolio Life by Christina Wallace is a refreshing and practical playbook for those seeking to achieve sustainable work-life balance while optimizing their happiness, personal growth, and bank accounts. In this inspiring book, Wallace challenges traditional career advice and instead proposes a new approach to work that she calls the "Portfolio Life."

Wallace argues that pouring oneself into a single full-time job is the riskiest move in today's world, where recessions, student loan debt, and climate disasters can quickly upend one's career plans. Instead, she advocates for diversification and rebalancing as the key tenets of a Portfolio Life. According to Wallace, a Portfolio Life allows individuals to define themselves beyond their paid labor, navigate change, and mitigate uncertainty.

Drawing on her experience as a Harvard professor and serial entrepreneur, Wallace adapts business practices to help readers build flexible, fulfilling, and sustainable lives. The book is filled with case studies, research, and actionable steps to help readers design a long-term strategy that prioritizes rest, relationships, and a rewarding career.

What sets The Portfolio Life apart from other books on work-life balance is Wallace's emphasis on rejecting the cult of ambition and focusing on the long haul. She recognizes that people's needs and priorities change over time and that a successful Portfolio Life requires ongoing rebalancing.

Overall, The Portfolio Life is a great read for anyone seeking a new approach to work that prioritizes flexibility, fulfillment, and sustainability. Wallace's writing is engaging, relatable, and inspiring, making this book a valuable resource for anyone looking to live their best life.

Portfolio Life is written for an audience of millennials or younger, so as someone touching 50, I'm not in the target readership. Nevertheless, the points are very relevant to me as someone trying to develop a worklife that fits in and around my established family life, elderly parents and varied interests after a decades-long stint of being a homeschooling parent with a PhD.

And that's the whole point of this book. Create a life that encompasses all of your quirks and individual strengths.

We normally hear that you've got to niche down in your career, but there's value in having many different interests and talents. And this includes having a life outside of work. Christina Wallace has filled this book with real-life examples of people who have gone through the struggle of having to choose one over the other and then finally finding happiness in a portfolio life.

I love this book. The author sucked me in during the first paragraph and I didn't stop reading until I figured out my own Portfolio Life. I particularly liked the helpful exercises in this book. They help you pinpoint what you value and truly wish for your life.

My favorite take-away from this book is that it is less risky to be "memorably lop-sided than forgettably well-rounded". You are multidimensional, embrace that with a portfolio life.

Thank you NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for sending this ebook for review consideration. All opinions are my own.