Build Your Portfolio Career: The Strategy of Scatteredness
A self-paced course for multi-passionate people designing a more intentional portfolio career.
Who This Course is For
This experience is designed for people whose interests don’t fit neatly into a single category.
Instead of forcing everything into a single lane, this course explores how your diverse interests might actually be the foundation of a thoughtful and flexible career.
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You have multiple interests or skills and struggle to explain how they fit together
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You’ve been told you need to “pick one thing” but that advice has never felt quite right
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Your career path has been nonlinear, exploratory, or difficult to describe
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You’re curious about portfolio careers, creative work, or building multiple streams of meaningful work
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You enjoy connecting ideas across disciplines and exploring unexpected directions
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You’re rethinking what a sustainable, meaningful career might look like in a rapidly changing world
What You'll Explore in the Course
Each module introduces a new lens for exploring your interests, experiences, and possibilities. Through reflection exercises and small experiments, you'll begin connecting ideas that may have previously felt scattered.
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Module 1 — The Myth of Focus
Reframing “scatteredness” as creative range and identifying personal myths about success. -
Module 2 — Designing a Life That Fits
Setting constraints and intentions; defining what “fit” means across time, money, and energy. -
Module 3 — Mapping Your Multitudes
Guided self-mapping of passions, skills, curiosities, and values to find overlaps and opportunities. -
Module 4 — The Emotional Design of Reinvention
Navigating uncertainty, self-doubt, and identity shifts through reflective exercises and community dialogue. -
Module 5 — Finding Your People
Building and activating your ecosystem: peers, collaborators, and connectors. -
Module 6 — Small Bets, Big Shifts
Designing and running additional low-risk experiments to test new work ideas or creative directions. -
Module 7 — The Economics of Enough
Understanding income mix, defining “enough,” and balancing security with freedom. -
Module 8 — Iteration as Identity
Synthesizing what you’ve learned, sharing prototypes, and designing your next iteration.
Why This Approach Works
Traditional career advice often assumes that success comes from choosing a single focus and pursuing it relentlessly.
But many meaningful careers evolve differently. They emerge through exploration, experimentation, and the discovery of connections between interests over time.
Design thinking offers a useful framework for this process. Instead of trying to predict the perfect path in advance, it encourages small experiments, reflection, and iteration. Over time, patterns begin to emerge.
This course applies those principles to the question of how your diverse interests might come together to form a thoughtful and sustainable portfolio of work.
But many meaningful careers evolve differently. They emerge through exploration, experimentation, and the discovery of connections between interests over time.
Design thinking offers a useful framework for this process. Instead of trying to predict the perfect path in advance, it encourages small experiments, reflection, and iteration. Over time, patterns begin to emerge.
This course applies those principles to the question of how your diverse interests might come together to form a thoughtful and sustainable portfolio of work.
What participants are saying
“This course doesn’t treat curiosity like a distraction. It creates space to explore it with structure and support. Sometimes we just need a little validation that it’s okay to try something new.”
First Cohort Participant
“As you move through the material, you start to see how everything builds on itself and why each piece matters. Design thinking magic.”
First Cohort Participant
“Adults don’t get enough chances to learn and grow through fun. This course created that space while helping me think through possible life paths — exciting and a little scary in the best way.”
First Cohort Participant
“This course doesn’t treat curiosity like a distraction. It creates space to explore it with structure and support. Sometimes we just need a little validation that it’s okay to try something new.”
First Cohort Participant
FAQ
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Do I need a specific career goal before joining?
No. In fact, many participants join because they don’t have a clear next step yet.
This course is designed to help you explore your interests, notice patterns, and experiment with possible directions. The goal isn’t to arrive with a perfect plan; it’s to develop better ways of thinking about what might come next. -
What kinds of people typically join the course?
Participants often include people who are:
- exploring a career transition
- feeling pulled in multiple directions professionally
- curious about portfolio careers or interdisciplinary work
- looking for a more creative way to think about their future
Many people join at moments of transition, but the course can be valuable any time you're reflecting on what comes next. -
Who is this course not for?
This course may not be the best fit if you’re looking for a rigid step-by-step career formula or a quick answer about what job to pursue next.
Instead, the course emphasizes curiosity, experimentation, and reflection as ways to discover meaningful directions over time. -
How long does the course take to complete?
Most people move through the course in about 16-20 hours, depending on how much time they spend with the reflection exercises. Because the course is self-paced, you can work through the material whenever it fits your schedule.
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Do I have lifetime access?
Yes. Once you enroll, you’ll be able to return to the lessons and exercises whenever you want. Many people revisit the material when they’re exploring a new transition or idea.
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Can I go through the course more than once?
Yes. Many people revisit the exercises at different points in their careers.
Because the course focuses on reflection, experimentation, and connecting ideas between interests, you may notice new patterns or possibilities when you return to it later. Your answers will likely evolve as your experiences do. -
Is this course focused on job searching?
Not directly.
While some participants may be thinking about job changes, the course focuses more broadly on understanding your interests, patterns, and possibilities. Many people find that clearer career decisions follow naturally from that process. -
What is your refund policy?
If you enroll and realize the course isn’t the right fit, you can request a full refund within the first week of the program. Because the course is cohort-based and space is limited, refunds are not available after that point.
Meet your instructor
Emily Holmes (she/her)
Design thinking coach, educator, facilitator, and mixed-media artist.
Emily Holmes is a design thinking strategist, facilitator, and visual artist who helps people and organizations tackle complex challenges through human-centered design and creative exploration. She believes deeply in the power of collaborative, rapid experimentation to unlock insights, spark creativity, and generate meaningful solutions.
Over the past several years, she has worked as a consultant and trainer with dozens of organizations, guiding teams through design sprints, research activities, and innovation workshops that help them better understand their users and experiment with new ideas. Her consulting work has included collaborations with organizations such as NASA, The Nature Conservancy, and major universities and cultural institutions, including work on a multi-institutional digital archive for artist Judy Chicago.
Before launching her consulting practice, Curious Consulting, Emily served as Director of User Experience for Research and Development at Hobsons, a global education technology company. There she introduced user research and Lean UX practices into the product development process and helped lead the development of a college and career readiness curriculum for first-generation teenagers that generated more than $8.5 million in revenue during its first year.
A lifelong creative, Emily has also been an exhibit designer for an interactive science museum, a professional singer, a front-end developer, a web consulting entrepreneur, a fire juggler, and the owner of a stained glass studio whose work was sold through galleries and catalog companies around the world. She also sells her mixed-media work, including paintings, collage, glass, and metal work, to galleries through her business Emily Holmes Design.
Emily holds a BA in Art History and Visual Art from Duke University and a Master’s degree in Human Factors from Bentley University. She lives on a small island on the Outer Banks, off the coast of North Carolina.
In this course, Emily brings a creative and exploratory approach that helps participants notice patterns, connect ideas, and experiment with new ways of thinking about problems, possibilities, and the design of their own lives.
Meet your instructor
Lee Wilmoth (they/them)
Human-centered learning strategist, facilitator, and personal stylist.
Lee is a human-centered learning strategist, facilitator, and personal stylist with over 10 years of experience helping people navigate change, express who they are, and show up with intention — in their work, their lives, and what they wear.
Through their independent consultancy, Learn & Work, Lee weaves together human-centered design, adult learning and development, and facilitation to create engaging, holistic learning experiences that improve culture and organizational development. Lee holds an MA Ed. in Adult Learning and Development from Portland State University and certificates in Human-Centered Design from the LUMA Institute. They've contributed to government agencies, tech, higher education, retail, healthcare, and more — designing everything from collaborative decision-making processes to workshops and engagement programs.
Whatever the context, Lee embeds joy and play, nervous system awareness, and equity and inclusion approaches to build solutions that are useful, usable, and desirable.
As a stylist and founder of Out of the Closet Fits, Lee extends this same philosophy into the wardrobe. They help people and professionals express their values and presence through what they wear — with a focus on restyling existing wardrobes to unlock fresh combinations and authentic personal style without starting from scratch. For Lee, getting dressed is a daily practice of self-expression and confidence.
In this course, Lee brings a reflective and exploratory perspective that helps participants connect ideas, question assumptions, and experiment with new ways of thinking about career and purpose.
You don’t need a five-year plan.
Many meaningful careers don’t begin with a perfectly defined path. They emerge through curiosity, experimentation, and the gradual discovery of connections between interests.