Posted by nichochar 2 days ago
For great parents, if you can think on your own, don't look further than your own parents. Did they something right.
It really depressed me at the time, realising there was a class of entrepreneurs and backers who were genuinely stop-at-nothing, even if it meant their three-year-old at day care was wondering why he was the only nappy-wearer, and carrying that subliminally into later life.
What I learnt from that and host of other experiences over time was that a young family and running a venture-backed, high-growth trajectory business aren't very compatible, but...
What I've also learned is that your first venture's going to be imperfectly executed anyway, so get the learnings out of the way anyway, with kids in the picture, then go again when the kids are school-age, and hope they get to enjoy the fruits of venture number two as teenagers.
Also, I never saw consistency from the people who put venture before family. They'd be buying shots for young staff at 11.00 at night on a week night, checking their crypto-balance continously, micro-managing, taking unnecessary business trips, etc. There are some absolute time-management machines out there, who never seem to waste a moment of their working days (I know two, and they both combined successful startups and young families), but in reality everyone needs some downtime/respite and family time is a better restorative than anything else except pure rest.
On that point, there's the famous adage, 'Startup, sleep, parenthood. Pick any two.' I picked startup and parenthood. Sleep deprivation means I look 10 years older than I am, but no regrets.
Finally, I think kids give you a second wave of competitive determination after your initial ambition wanes. Problematic investors, cheating competitors, over-demanding enterprise customers, careless execs, etc. could leave a lone individual feeling sorry for themselves, and defeatist. It's amazing how creative and determined one becomes when it feels like these different personas are causing setbacks that, rathervthan just interfering with your personal ambitions, might be stealing your kids' future opportunities and financial security.
I'm getting to the point where I too feel like I most likely won't be noteworthy in any professional sense (i.e. a name known across the industry), but at moments like that I take solace in the fact I'm taking time to spend with my son, learn alongside him, and provide him a life that I never had in so many other ways.
I think the author is spot on about ruthlessly optimizing the time you do have, though. That seems to be the only way to keep up.
I don't care, especially with AI. I just let it do all the work and I take credit. Plus career progression after a certain point is useless - more responsibilities for smaller increases in paycheck. I found that being a senior developer is the sweet spot for me - others have to think about the product and requirements and communicate and I just sit autistically in the corner and ship at my own pace.
I will say for me this is the root contradiction:
> I do not believe the quality time theory. I firmly believe in maximizing the quantity of time spent with them; there are no diminishing returns for them on that front.
If you believe that to be the most true statement, then it leads to the conclusion that you should work as little as possible to spend as most time with them, up to and including not working at all. The ambition to be kidmaxxing, if you will. This is incompatible with career ambition obviously.
I guess i'm just sharing the same frustration but with a stronger conclusion - it seems fundamentally contradictory to be ambitious in both, at least at young ages. Seems like we're fooling ourselves if we think you can, we're compromising on one aspect at least.
You can be reasonably successful in multiple areas, but you can't max them all, you have to compromise somehow.
If you have kids and you prioritize your career to the point you never see your kids, and you will have huge and legitimate regrets later in life. Especially if you don't achieve Jobs / Musk level of financial success. That's pretty common knowledge.
But the opposite is also true. As parents, we're always examples for our kids, for better or worse. Do we want our kids to see us abandon our dreams 'because of them' or do we want them to see their parents showing them how to go after their dreams, because that's what life is about ?
Strong connections with kids are the most important thing, but it cannot be the only one. It wouldn't end great neither for both parties.
Note that I am not talking about earning a living and thus necessarily sacrificing time doing that and showing your kids that sometimes you have to work hard to survive in a decent way. I am talking about the parents who outsource their children to childcare to work to pay off the loan on their third car and newest iphone and tell you that they have no choice.
Ambition and drive are important but there's an important "so what" there as well. Am I aimlessly ambitious or am I ambitious for the sake of being able to support my family and make a significant impact on the world? If you are lucky enough to have the second orientation then I think there's less conflict between these things.
I have plenty to tech and finance friends who are successful and in our mid 40s, and unfortunately for those who neglected to have the family side of the equation, the shine is wearing off. What's the point of making the next level promotion and making the next 200k pay bump when what you do with it is come back to your apartment by yourself? Sure it's more comfortable and could still be fun to be ambitious and successful but it's lacking the goal piece.
The other half of my friends have family and then the financial etc success feeds directly into it. Can you give your family a good home, a good education, good experiences? It's easier for me to call a "success" a friend with a 4 bedroom house with 3 kids on it, than one with a Manhattan penthouse with no kids in it, even if the homes cost the same. It's just a different dimension.
The other thing is - making the world a better place for the future. The kids you raise and the work you achieve both feed into that. And also the future you are building is something that will benefit your kids - so all the things are aligned.
Then it becomes a "simple" balance - what's the thing that maximizes what I actually want to achieve. I want to be a good father and that takes both being with the kids, and working to make money - and also to set a good example for them of what work looks like. So yes in a simple sense you become less productive because you are going to work fewer hours, but I don't feel less productive in the grand total of life because all the things I am doing across work and family add up to what I want to accomplish.
I am curiosit - I bet many people will read this and think "of course, I feel the same way and what other way to feel is there" and others will say "I disagree at the root" which goes back to this being something with how your family raised you and the perspective you have from it.
Maybe it is. But there's still something to be said for breaking out of that and trying to see your own way in the world. Until it beats you back down and biology takes over and you start to understand life. Kids can only be taught so much; they have to burn their finger on that stove in their own way and time. Millenials still had that connection to and context of the old world that the younger generations now do not; (my wife and I have expressed that we want the life our grandparents had together, to the bewilderment of our Boomer/GenX parents), so maybe we have a bit of leg up in that regard. But I think the ones who didn't will come around naturally as well as the social media driven hustle culture burns itself out.