Sustaining Self-Improvement With Diversification

Financial diversification is spreading your assets across different avenues in order to reduce risk. 

By spreading your assets, whether it be bonds, shares, or stocks, etc., they’re essentially unaffected by the same reasons. Meaning if one fails or takes a dip, it’s isolated, and the damage can be balanced out by the others.

Financial diversification can be one of the smartest strategies a person can use, especially when investing. It’s the “Don’t put all your eggs into one basket” of the financial world. 

If the basket breaks, you lose all your eggs.

Well, there is also a way you can use diversification to your advantage during the process of self-development and growth, without it having anything at all to do with money.

The Risk

Financial risk is losing your money, egg-carrying risk is breaking your eggs, and growth risk is anything that causes you to revert to old ways and lose the momentum of your improvement.

It’s very common during the early stages of change to put all of your self-improvement eggs into one basket. Common baskets are exercise, weight loss, business or study. Something sparks enough motivation or interest to begin your journey, and from everything it teaches you and the improvement you get from it, it becomes the anchor that everything else relies upon.

Take weight loss. The change you experience starts leaking into other areas of your life, so you’re not only thinner, but you’re also smarter with your money and paying more attention at work. But the momentum in all of those areas is riding on the back of the weight loss. As it was the cause, it’s also what everything else continues to rely on.

That’s where the risk is. If anything disrupts the weight loss, like a week on holiday or even reaching your goal weight, everything else can fall like dominoes.

It’s not only momentum that’s at stake, either. If we’re not careful, we identify so strongly with this one thing that any disruption to it leaves us no choice but to revert back to the identity we’re trying so hard to leave behind.

Exercise is the most common example, as the lessons and skills learned from a consistent routine transfer easily across most areas of life. Get injured, and suddenly everything else falls apart too.

So what do you do?

The Prongs

The prongs are an analogy I came up with a few years ago when dealing with this very problem. For me, it was exercise, and whenever something would disrupt my exercise, I would find myself reverting back to old habits and modes of thought very quickly.

Think of a spear and imagine sticking it into the ground, how likely do you think it would be for the spear to keep standing and weather some wind? Probably unlikely. But a pitchfork, however, has a much better chance.

Everything above ground is the same: a long, thin handle. But it’s what’s beneath that’s keeping the pitchfork standing. With each added prong comes extra strength, so that even if you were to lose a prong, you still wouldn’t come crashing down.

Each added prong is another area in which you can improve, learn and grow. And just like financial diversification, each prong should almost have nothing to do with the other.

Adding more things to do and avenues to grow might sound like a lot, especially for those of you who are just starting. But each prong doesn’t have to be as important, take as much time or energy, or even cause as much growth as the others.

They can be learning a language, reading books, meditating or even writing a journal. What they are doesn’t matter nearly as much as the act of having your growth spread across multiple avenues.

This way, even though it would suck to get injured, at least it wouldn’t cause a complete backwards spiral, as you still have other areas to direct your energy and keep momentum alive.

You don’t have to add loads of unnecessary tasks, but stabilising your growth through diversifying your growth is a good idea. If you have an anchor, add a handful of other areas that you’re able to continue making improvements in, especially when the anchor is disrupted.