Diversify Your Life
The advice to businesses is always to diversify like crazy, not to keep all their golden eggs in one slightly fragile-looking basket. The idea being that if one market you’re in zigs, hopefully the other one will zag to make up for any fall in business.
I believe diversification is important for individuals as well as businesses. Sure, you don’t have a bottom line to worry about, you won’t have to lay people off if business takes a tumble, but a lack of diversification can affect you in other ways. I’ve written before about the benefits of thinking of yourself as a business and this idea dovetails nicely with that outlook.
Let’s take a look at the various areas of your life in which it could be useful to diversify and what might happen if you don’t:
Diversify your friend base
Don’t get left bowling alone when your best friend moves away. Don’t let a new significant other isolate you from your friends – if the romance fades you want to have a social group ready to help you drown your sorrows or plot your next conquest.
Diversify your interests
If you only have one hobby, you might get sick of it. If you don’t have any hobbies to speak of, perhaps because your work is all-consuming, you might find you become polarised in your outlook and burn out. So try all sorts of different things, preferably activities that call on different types of skills.
For example you might have active hobbies such as running, creative hobbies such as writing, relaxing hobbies like reading, and manual hobbies such as woodwork or cooking. This way you should have a go-to activity for whatever mood you’re in and avoid the insidious time waster that is boredom.
Diversify your income
Most people have a single source of income – their job. It’s wise to plan for the worst, so you might keep an emergency fund of money to see you through a few months if you lose your job. You can augment this with what have deliciously been termed ‘side hustles‘, or side projects, that generate a little bit of income. These probably won’t keep the wolf from the door if you do find yourself on the wrong side of a ‘restructuring’, but every little helps. This could be a second job, some freelance work such as tutoring or writing, or trying to squeeze a little cash out of an interest such as fixing computers or building websites.
Diversify your investments
Don’t invest in just one company, one sector or even one country. Spread your favours – gains might be less spectacular, but your losses probably won’t break your heart either. And while you’re at it, grab a broad-based, low-expense index tracker fund such as those offered by Vanguard in the US. Heck, if index funds are good enough for Warren Buffett, they’re good enough for me and automatically spread your cash across the whole of a market. As far as I can tell there’s no UK equivalent to Vanguard, but cheap index funds can be found if you know where to look and are especially tax-efficient if wrapped in an ISA or personal pension.
Diversify your reading habits
Do you always read books on just one topic, or in one genre? Or do you read only in one medium, say online at the expense of the printed page? If you’re at all like me you might find an author you like and proceed to read all of their books as a marathon.
Reading is a good way to relax and so you might not always want to be challenged. But reading something completely different exposes you to new ideas and ways of thinking, hopefully making you a more rounded individual. So perhaps pick up a book you wouldn’t normally consider reading and give it a shot. You could do this for every fourth book you read. It needn’t cost you any money – trawl your own or friends’ and family’s bookshelves for ideas, or head to the local library. At least this way if you decide you’re never going to be interested in particle physics, no matter how much more rounded it might make you, it hasn’t cost you anything.
In what other areas of life could you diversify? Scribble down your ideas in the comments.
The Draw of the Coffee Shop
Why do people love coffee shops? If you’re like me you walk past several each day. You see the people inside and feel a little jealous. If you’re really like me you’ll remember there’s free coffee at home or at work and keep on walking. But every once in a while, or maybe every day, you’ll go inside and indulge.
Everybody knows about the huge success of Starbucks and there are hundreds of other chains all making money out of the same concept. If you’re lucky you’ll even find a friendly independent place nearby.
But what is it about coffee shops that has us hooked? There are of course many reasons why coffee shops are popular: good coffee, a place to meet friends, a place to watch the world go by, somewhere to relax and read.
But there’s one reason I’ve noticed in myself and suspect of others: it feels good. The coffee shops are selling a lifestyle, a cafe culture. I find it hard to define, but it’s an intangible sense of well-being, a warmness blended with a sense that you’re an important person who deserves this little indulgence in your busy life.
Do we want other people to see us and think we’re cool, important or successful? I rather suspect that in some cases we do. Where’s my evidence? All I have is that I’ve felt all of those things in connection with coffee shops.
It’s extremely clever marketing. It’s effectively giving people a way to spend money to feel good about themselves and even to pose. That’s not a concept unique to coffee shops, but I find they execute it particularly well.
The question here is: does any of this matter? Well, the so-called ‘latte factor’ can be hazardous to your wealth. Excessive caffeine can be hazardous to your health. But those are extremes. In general it’s an easy and not too expensive way to feel good.
Maybe you’ll ponder just what it is that draws you in next you’re quietly sipping something at the coffee shop.
photo credit: Dave Austria
