Portfolio Career

If you want to be good at everything, do people think you're good at nothing?

Humans like a sense of sameness. We trust what we can categorize. We are wired to understand predictability and consistency. As our brains atrophy in an effort to optimize and keep up with the claudes¹, we have even less ability or capacity to critique the unfamiliar.

The concept of trusting what we can understand directly applies to getting hired in 2026, something I think about every day.

It’s simple math, really. Constantly push out content so that your audience understands you (or thinks they do). Then they eventually trust you and then they eventually hire you. Then you pay for healthcare.

There’s a lot of discourse in the LinkedIn communities around having a niche for this content. A niche is allegedly the way you get known for being the expert in a particular area. It’s why people buy from you, why you can charge a premium, and an angle for stabilizing an otherwise debased business landscape.

just another day as BEST’s CEO, COO, CRO

My creative studio BEST has dug our heels in on not niching. Arguing that the amount of value we bring to the work is directly proportional to our diversity of lived experience. It creates a more informed, culturally aware and nuanced taste level for whatever brand or category we’re working in. And I love being in the business of taste.

Today every product is a brand. Every person is a brand. Every brand needs to earn its place in their audience’s budget. And to do that you must add value. You have to fit into and enhance their lifestyle. Add to their conversation in a way they can’t themselves.

IMO you absolutely must be tapped in and turned on to the other aspects of their life outside of said niche in order to do this successfully, or for the long run. Being discerning of other categories, other products, other conversations. All the rivers feed into the same stream, brotha! My knowledge of run clubs absolutely makes me better at branding a happy hour bevvie because what the girls are talking about at happy hour is the run club.

me with my ICPs

Further, Creative Directors orchestrating these brands, like myself, need to be generalists—able to both strategize the work, do the work, and report on the return of the work.

Enter the portfolio career.²

I have been thinking a lot lately about if it’s possible to be all the versions of me in a way that reads the same across industries, across communities, and will set me up for this next chapter of my career which will be based largely on who I am and not what I can do because what I can do might be done by a robot.

Last week I attended a guest lecture The Power of Personal Branding: Building Influence, Visibility, and Authority in the Digital Age. Maha Abouelenein, an “Expert to the Experts,” said consistent visibility is the key to reputation is the key to longevity is the key to getting and staying employed.

“The market doesn’t just reward the most qualified person, it rewards the most visible expert.”

Wednesday a podcast comes out where I talk about the agonizing softness of not having the nuclear family I dreamt of. Not light material. On the same day it will be announced that I’ve joined a network full of C-Suite industry heavy-hitters. An opportunity to expand my career reach.

The way I speak about the conversation I had on that podcast, and the way I promote my value to a professional community is not the same. I’ll likely share the podcast, I Think I Like You, with my personal community. I’ll share being accepted to THE BOARD on professional networks.

actual footage of me listening to my own voice

Is being a creative enigma in my personal life actually diluting my impact as a creative expert in my professional life?

If I were to merge all of this content into one visible FIREHOSE OF ALISON, would I be more or less understood? And if we’re talking bottom line, does the far-reaching variety of my personal interest negatively impact, or even just distract from the premium value I bring to my professional endeavors?

Will they love me at my Margaritaville and my American Ballet Theatre? At my technicolor Auntwave and my F&B Elephant’s Breath?³

I guess what I’m questioning is if you want to be good at everything, do people think you’re good at nothing?

Or, the omnipresent prompt—am I just making myself smaller?

my “founder vision” from a BD deck I did last year (s/o Melissa!)

Julia Sherman wrote a perfect piece on the topic:

I was conditioned to seek approval, a drive that is in direct opposition to my inability to conform or quiet down. But I am interested in embracing the contradictions of being both strong and soft, “intimidating” and caring at the same time. In Willful Subjects, Sara Ahmed writes that for women, “willfulness is treated as a failure of character rather than a response to constraint.” I feel the constraints every day.

This week’s constraint is the constraint of compartmentalizing every version of myself into a platform-appropriate package. The constraint of wondering if the podcast me and the boardroom me can coexist without one undermining the other.

Keeping my art separate has been an act of self-preservation. Using it as a tool to bolster my work instead of define it, protecting it from profit, allows it to materialize naturally instead of through the filter of an algorithm.

building my resume

But as everyone within earshot knows by now, I’m 44 so have less and less energy to hold the line. And maybe that’s how it is for everyone? Aren’t we tired of the code switching? Isn’t it boring and drab? Maybe instead of even having this discussion we can all just agree to kick off our Salomon ST-6s, put down the ring lights, take our bras off, and hang free.

1. If you want to know what I think about this, sign up for BEST’s newsletter BEST Kept. This month I’m tackling AIification Nation.

2. A portfolio career is a professional path where an individual manages multiple income streams, roles, or projects simultaneously—such as combining part-time work, freelancing, consulting, or creative endeavors—rather than relying on a single full-time employer. It offers flexibility, increased resilience, greater autonomy, and the ability to pursue diverse interests while mitigating the risk of relying on one job.

3. Repeats in mirror.