I think the hardest part is how to define “waste”. Are you “wasting” your time if you go to a school event for your kids during the weekday? Is it a waste of time walking your kids to the bus? Is it a waste of time reading to my kids before they sleep? I argue it’s extremely hard to draw that line and a personal question for sure but being “efficient” is hard.

"I firmly believe in maximizing the quantity of time spent with them; there are no diminishing returns for them on that front."

This is something that should be self evident to any parent, no need to write or read a piece to establish that truism.

Time to close the laptop and spend time with the kids...

I too have to disagree with pg on that line `> having kids may make one less ambitious`. The fact is that the world is very very multi-modal, i.e. the brains of people and how they think are wildly different. I think having kids makes me more ambitious and more focused, and more selective re the problems I work on, partly because I am also setting an example.

It is not just the time. Having kids (dependents) consciously or subconsciously lowers your risk threshold. Makes you less flexible in a lot of aspects. All these little things will lead to tempering your ambitions or take on additional stress to keep it up..

I feel like my dreams have died with becoming a parent and having a family. 2 hours of free time isn't enough focus time to do anything significant or learn anything. I thought abound going back to school recently and there's no practical way to pull it off. Once they're in school I'll be in my 40s anyway. I doubt I'm pivoting my life into anything fun at that point. It's been tough to deal with mentally.

“You can’t have it all” frequently comes unbidden into my brain when thinking about this sort of thing.

I don’t know, my goals are more and more about cool stuff I can do with my kids, and far less about business stuff? I’m not less ambitious but my ambitions have changed?

Maybe you should read about women's career choices because for them it might be even more challenging to make trade-off btw career and family. Your inspiring figures seems to be mainly men and I don't have a lot of examples of women in tech (I'm not just well informed enough) but in other fields such as politics it might be very inspiring to have their advices. It would be also very meaningful to have a small glimpse at how you and your wife chose to balance careers and life because maybe the balance btw family and work is more at couple level rather than one of the two of you. thanks for sharing your thought here, wishng you good luck for your kids, your wife and you mate ;)

I'm coming out of the period where my kids need less help and it's really great working on projects alongside my kids making stuff. I try to model working on my projects as something that is enjoyable to me and that I am working over a long time period.

The trade offs are real, but a suppressed desire to have kids can lead to dissatisfaction and with time that will be hard to ignore or fix.

Also, let's just not ignore that Musk is wildly successful in having shown you an example that you don't have to choose one thing

I can think of three other great dads who were hugely ambitious:

* Jimmy Carter * Bill Clinton * Barak Obama