What's A Portfolio Career?

Bad On Paper

Becca Freeman

Skincare, Beauty, Society & Culture, Comedy, Advice, Books, Arts, Careers

4.9 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we're talking all about portfolio careers! We discuss the current iteration of our own careers and then chat with Leigh Stein and Ali LaBelle—two other professionals with portfolio careers—to break down the work they do, time management, and advice for people interested in transitioning to a portfolio career.

Obsessions

Becca - West End Girl

Olivia - Beth's Dead

What we read this week

Olivia - The Good Daughters by Brigitte Dale

Becca - The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer (Out April 7), Little One by Olivia Muenter (Out Feb 3)

This Month's Book Club Pick - The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (have thoughts about this book you want to share? Call in at 843-405-3157 or email us a voice memo at [email protected])

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone and welcome to Bad on Paper podcast. I'm Olivia Mentor. And I'm Becca Freeman. And today we are
0:24.1	talking all about portfolio careers, which is, well, Becca, do you want to give the definition for what a
0:30.8	portfolio career is before we dive into these conversations? Oh, I sure can. I pulled it off of Wikipedia.
0:36.8	So a portfolio career,
0:39.4	according to Wikipedia, comprises a variety of roles rather than one job at a single organization.
0:45.4	It can be a career that combines multiple paid and or voluntary roles. So instead of when I was
0:53.5	a freelancer, I did one thing and I had multiple clients,
0:56.9	this would be kind of cobbling together your career out of multiple different things.
1:03.2	And this is how both of us are making our career right now. And I feel like it's becoming
1:07.5	more and more common, just given where the job market is. And so we have two
1:12.1	amazing guests today. One is an author. And then one is a creative in a different field that we're
1:18.0	talking to about how their careers work. It's good to have perspectives from many different careers and not
1:24.1	just authors, even though pretty much all authors have portfolio careers
1:28.0	in case you didn't know. Well, before we get into career chat, we have some high highs. I want to
1:35.0	hear about what's going on. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of highs in the world this week, I think,
1:41.0	which is refreshing for once. But in my world, I have two highs that I want
1:45.7	to talk about. The first is that I successfully, I think, pulled off my first ever
1:53.3	completely DIY hosted reading and writing retreat in the Catskills. It was three days and two nights. It was almost 20 of us.
2:04.0	I think it was 19, including me. And it was exactly how I wanted it to be. The weather was beautiful.
2:10.5	The people were lovely. It was so cool just to be around people who share the same interests and
2:16.4	especially the same love of reading
2:19.3	and writing. And I didn't really get much reading or writing done, both because I was like kind of
	...

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