Wade Kingsley says diversifying and finding balance in life, much like an investment portfolio, is the key to sustainable success.
While Wade isn’t a property investor himself, he embodies the values and mindset of a successful investor.
In fact, he uses the same principles to stimulate creativity, generate ideas and achieve goals in his own life, especially his career.
The founder of The Ideas Business joined KnowHow founder Bushy Martin on the Get Invested podcast to talk about the importance of diversifying your experiences and expanding your knowledge, even if it doesn’t necessarily seem relevant at the time.
“What I am is a good learner, and one of the things I remember being taught when I was within a big corporate environment was trying to understand how companies work, how finance for companies work, how cashflow works and how business profitability is determined. Even though it wasn’t directly in my role, I chose to learn about that sort of stuff, not because I could see an actual use for it at the time, but just in case I wanted to know it one day,” Wade said.
“And what that meant was when I decided to go out on my own, I think I treated my career a little bit like an investment portfolio. You don’t just go put every single cent you have into one income stream or ‘I’m putting all the bets on this’. So I did the same thing, I diversified my skillset.
“I said ‘ok well what are the things I’m good at? Where could I provide value? I can write a bit so I could be a writer. I could be a copywriter. I can facilitate sessions so I could be a corporate facilitator and do that kind of thing’ … And so basically I divided up my time and I put my investment of time into all of these different areas because I knew that the market would have to tell me what they wanted me to do, even though I was going to the market and saying here are the things I can do.
“Some investments mature quicker than others and some take longer, and I knew that I don’t have enough data to be able to make a call, and so what I’ve built, my business is now four years old, is a diversified time portfolio.
“Literally Google [my name] and there’s a few different versions of me and brands existing out there, but they’re a reflection of the fact that I diversified my time across different portfolios, if you like, to be able to see which investments pay off sooner, and some are growing faster than others. But to just go ‘right well I’m Wade Kingsley this is all I can do so buy me or not’, I just didn’t feel like that was the right approach.”
Part of diversifying your life and achieving success is also finding balance, especially in your work patterns.
“I know it’s a cliche, but the ability to control my time is what the balance actually means for me. Like I work from home, I have a home office and it’s separate to the house so I can walk into the house at night and I’ll finish my day’s work,” he said.
“Sustainable success is about actually living the balance where you can and finding those opportunities … success for a lot of people now is the ability to realise that they are in a bit more control and they can judge their rhythms where they perform best.”
Wade also explained the importance of taking risks because every investment into your knowledge, network or career will still hold value even if you experience a short-term fail.
“I think sometimes people get afraid of pushing themselves off the cliff … they can think if I’m going to do this, then I’m putting too much at stake, too much at risk,” Wade said.
“Obviously the actual numbers come into play, but in any risk in an investment strategy you look at the point of return, you look at it from your own time and your own financial investment or your own reputation. And you have to remember that you still have a lot of investment in the bank with the value yet to be realised.
“At any point you can go, ‘look, I tried this thing on my own, it didn’t work for now and that’s ok’. I’m alright with that because I can just revisit all the years and all the time and all the education and all the knowledge I’ve built and the relationships I’ve built because they don’t evaporate – they’re still there and it’s still in the bank.”
Listen to the full interview here.
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