Real Insights: The Human Venn Diagram, A Conversation with Christina Wallace
This interview is part of the R Street Institute’s new Real Insights series, featuring deep conversations with a diverse range of experts, authors, and leaders about the intersection of leadership and issues critical to our civic discourse, democracy, and culture. We will release a new interview every three weeks and you can find them all here. Want to speak with Erica? Please contact pr@rstreet.org.
Introduction
What if the stories we’ve used to define success no longer reflect the complexity of how we live now? In a moment when many of us are rethinking not just what we do but why we do it, how do we design a meaningful life?
Christina Wallace, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, entrepreneur, Broadway producer, writer, and self-described “human Venn diagram,” brings a thoughtful perspective to these questions. Having built her career at the intersection of business, technology, and the arts, Christina provides an especially unique point of view combining her diverse areas of expertise.
Christina’s focus on challenging limiting self-narratives, designing a “portfolio life,” and rediscovering joy in the process rather than just the product feels especially timely. Her idea of the “human Venn diagram” goes beyond professional growth. It invites us to embrace pluralism, starting with ourselves.
Christina’s work also encouraged me to think about what this looks like inside a think tank. At R Street, we’re a policy shop, but we’re also a community of people trying to build something that matters. That means we ask hard questions, not just about what works, but what’s worth doing. It means leaving space for different perspectives, experiences, and career paths to inform how we think as much as what we produce. In practice, that can look like reconsidering old assumptions, resisting the pull of only what’s measurable, and staying open to better questions. Here, pluralism is more than a political idea. It’s a way of working and living together that starts with making room for difference, even within ourselves and our teams.
Key Insights
The Human Venn Diagram: Living at the Intersection
Christina’s concept of the “human Venn diagram” offers a compelling framework for how we might think about the range of roles, values, and expressions that make us who we are.
“I came up with this phrase, ‘I’m a human Venn diagram,’ 15 years ago because I kept being asked at investor pitches, dinner parties, or anything in between: ‘So tell me about yourself.’ The default—at least in the U.S.—is to respond with your job title, but I am so much more than how I am monetizing my time at any given chapter of my life.”
Christina suggests we consider how we “show up in a room,” as storytellers, connectors, creators, and the unique value we bring through our overlapping skills, experiences, and perspectives. She also encourages us to think of ourselves less as job titles and more as verbs. Are you a builder? A connector? A challenger of assumptions? Rather than fixed traits, these verbs are ways of engaging with the world.
“I sit at the intersection of so many different skills and networks and perspectives that to limit my identity to my job almost feels disempowering.”
Christina believes this approach is also strategically advantageous at a leadership level. It sets you up to showcase a much fuller and richer version of yourself to others and invites unexpected opportunities and connections.
In my own work as a leadership coach, I often use the PRO model from INSEAD: person, role, organization. It’s a simple tool, but it helps surface meaningful questions. Who am I becoming? What does this role need from me? And how do I fit, not just functionally, but purposefully, within the culture I help shape? These questions come alive when we stop reducing people to titles and start seeing them, and ourselves, as complex contributors.
Challenging Limiting Narratives
Christina’s approach asks us to question the stories we tell ourselves, particularly those that might limit our potential.
“One of my favorite phrases from the startup world is ‘expire your data.’ What that means is there’s lots of times that we’re using data that is out of date, it’s old, and if the world has changed, it’s no longer true, it’s no longer helping us.”
The same applies to the stories we tell ourselves and others about ourselves. Christina shared a powerful example of how she had believed she “wasn’t athletic” for much of her life: “It wasn’t until I was turning 30 that I was like, ‘I wonder if that’s actually true.’…So I started running long distance and I realized that the key to being athletic is to do athletic things and then improve.”
This concept is relevant to us as individuals and as a society as well, especially in a year when many Americans have watched long-standing assumptions give way overnight. Institutions that once felt immovable have shown themselves to be fragile or adaptable. Cultural norms, political alliances, and economic certainties have shifted, sometimes dramatically.
In moments like these, we’re reminded how much depends on the narratives we choose to carry, and how we learn to live alongside others whose stories differ from our own. As the world shifts around us, it helps to revisit those internal stories, too, and allow new possibilities to emerge.
Designing a Portfolio Life for Different Seasons
One of the most practical frameworks Christina offers is her approach to designing a “portfolio life” that optimizes for adapting to different seasons and priorities.
“You start with, what do you need? What do you need right now to be your best self? To feel like you are getting what you need?…Those needs will change as you go through these different seasons. Based on what you need, then you also layer in what do you want? What do you wish for your life?”
Some priorities might need to be set at “zero allocation” during certain seasons, but can be increased when circumstances change. When our portfolio no longer matches our current needs and priorities, that’s when we see burnout or crisis.
I couldn’t help but reflect on my own path as Christina shared her story. In my mid-twenties, I opened an independent bookstore and ran it for nearly a decade before shifting into the think tank world. Before that, I was a radio host at my local NPR station, and later, a bike messenger in Seattle.
These roles don’t sit neatly together on a résumé, but they do form a kind of logic when I look back—chapters shaped by curiosity, a love of ideas, and a drive to build things that matter. I’ve lived in Europe for the last 12 years, and I’ve more or less stopped trying to explain my career arc in my time here—it feels too improbable, especially in cultures where people are placed on professional tracks early in life and expected to stay on them.
But to me, it’s always made sense. I laugh sometimes and think it’s the most American thing about me. That winding path, that permission to explore, to grow is what Americans do. Christina’s idea of a “portfolio life” helped me see my path not just as a quirky backstory, but as something more intentional—a design built around meaning, season by season.
Measuring What Matters
Christina’s thinking has been profoundly influenced by Clayton Christensen, whose final lecture in his Harvard Business School class left a lasting impression on her.
“In this last session, he delivered this sort of off-the-cuff monologue that turned into the book, How Will You Measure Your Life?”
Christensen warned his students about the danger of consistently prioritizing easily measurable career achievements over more abstract investments in relationships, health, and personal development. Christina summarized it neatly:
“How do you measure your life? Because what you measure is what you manage. Be really intentional about the stuff that actually matters and not the stuff that’s easiest to measure.”
The exact same sense-check should be applied to the worlds of policy and business, especially in a pluralistic democracy, where what matters can’t be reduced to one metric, one value, or one story. Our discussion touched on how Silicon Valley start-up culture is a prime example of where some of these incentive structures are misaligned and can lead to negative long-term impacts on communities and people’s lives.
Finding Joy in the Process
When discussing what she optimizes for, Christina spoke powerfully about fulfillment: “Am I having more good days than bad? There are going to be weeks like this one that are hectic, but on balance, am I happy? Do I have agency? Am I getting to do the things that bring me joy?”
This perspective extends to how we approach activities where external validation or achievement might no longer be accessible. Christina gave the example of returning to the piano after years away from it: “Do I actually enjoy the playing of it and not just the applause at the end? As long as the answer is yes, then it’s worth doing.”
At R Street, we care about outcomes and impact, but we also care about how we get there. The process matters. Sometimes it’s slow, messy, or invisible from the outside, but that is where learning happens, where trust is built, and where new ideas take shape. For me, there’s meaning in doing good, aligned work—even when it doesn’t come with applause. That’s part of what it means to be a learning organization, one that grows by doing and not just by delivering
Final Thoughts: Embracing Complexity
This conversation with Christina Wallace felt like an evolution of the themes we’ve been exploring in Real Insights. Lenore Skenazy asked what happens when we stop optimizing for safety and start trusting people—kids included—to navigate risk and learn as they go. Jonah Goldberg reminded us that meaning isn’t found in national politics but in the small, daily acts of showing up, being useful, being needed, staying in the room.
Christina threads those insights inward. Her “human Venn diagram” isn’t just a fun turn of phrase; it’s a way to live with integrity across seasons. It’s a reminder that a life doesn’t need to be reduced to one label or role to be meaningful. If anything, embracing that complexity might be the clearest signal of a life well-lived.
What I took away from our conversation is that pluralism doesn’t just apply to democracy it starts in us. If we want institutions and societies that can hold competing ideas without falling apart, we need to start by practicing that capacity within ourselves, in how we come to know, revise, and live with our own complexity, and in how we hold tension, make meaning, and stay open to change. Learning to hold tension within ourselves might just be the best preparation we have for holding it together in public life.