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Being ambitious and being a dad

nicholascharriere.com

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Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#61

Post by ryandrake »

blobbers wrote: post #23

I'm shocked by the amount of time people who don't have kids waste. So while PG may believe that people may have their "act already together" pre-kids, I sort of look at the amount of time people without kids waste and think "if only I had that much free time..."

At every point in my life after age 25 or so, I could look back 10 years and be appalled at how much time I wasted back then. 50-year-old me is angry at 40-year-old me for wasting my 40s, as 25-year-old me was angry at 15-year-old me for wasting my high school time. What a waste my youth always seems!

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#62

Post by nullorempty »

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

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#63

Post by entech »

luqtas wrote: post #31
mholt wrote: post #5

"Be ambitious enough to be an ambitious dad." - agreed! Being an ambitious dad IS exhausting. And the successful people telling you that you can't be a present, ambitious dad and be successful -- that you have to trade successful fatherhood for professional success -- are weak. They are not heroes. The real heroes are the ones ambitiously raising the next generation while changing the world right now. That's what I a…

> The real heroes are the ones ambitiously raising the next generation while changing the world right now. so pedagogy and psychology researchers? giving that having biological children is the worst ecological offense someone can do in an ever increasing worldwide population? [0] how about adopting and getting into voluntary programs or even do pro-social things with your money? giving birth on the current societal s…

Things are considered important in the context of humanity. Environmental concerns only exist because of its impacts on humanity. The planet does not care.

Calling having children an ecological offence is like saying that best way to reduce emissions is for all people to die.

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#64

Post by daggerdrone »

katzgrau wrote: post #59

YC reject so I bootstrapped and was thankfully able to hit profitability before my first kid showed up. I’ve now got two. I also have dreams bigger than ever. In fact, writing this while sitting on the couch with the kids watching Muppet Treasure Island while my kids are wearing pirate hats and waving foam swords. I’m still extremely productive and prolific. Probably less compared with before. But before, I had frien…

Isn’t it unhealthy to skip both breakfast and lunch? How are you getting the energy to do stuff without eating?

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#65

Post by [deleted] »

ElProlactin wrote: post #21

The author seems self-aware and I think there's a lot of good observations in this post. At the same time, I think ambition needs to be paired with humility and acceptance of you can't have it all . There's no perfect life. You can't optimize everything such that you achieve a hypothesized balance between all the things that are competing for your time and energy. In the final analysis, most people, if given the chan…

[deleted]

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#66

Post by gritspants »

daggerdrone wrote: post #64
katzgrau wrote: post #59

YC reject so I bootstrapped and was thankfully able to hit profitability before my first kid showed up. I’ve now got two. I also have dreams bigger than ever. In fact, writing this while sitting on the couch with the kids watching Muppet Treasure Island while my kids are wearing pirate hats and waving foam swords. I’m still extremely productive and prolific. Probably less compared with before. But before, I had frien…

Isn’t it unhealthy to skip both breakfast and lunch? How are you getting the energy to do stuff without eating?

Yeah I had a schedule like that when the kids were very young but it caught up with me, frankly. Having the computer be the first and last thing I interacted with every day was not great for my mood either.

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#67

Post by hahahaa »

I wonder if the solution is simply to focus and effectively use resources so you can be effective and ambitious in a reasonable number of hours. Which is fine for 99.99%. Only if you are at the helm of discovering a revolution in physics or changing the world in some other way then go all in when you have kids. Which today is rare since team work makes the dream work way more. Of course there is greed. If you are greedy that is a different thing.

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#68

Post by whatever1 »

Being a parent teaches you how to stop procrastinating and use every second you have available. You are at your most productive era (work items per minute spent).

The bad news is that the day still has 24 hours, and that means that your career needs to adapt.

For example I had to turn down an opportunity that would require me to be putting 70 hours per week and I stayed at a job that I could do 9-5. That opportunity went sideways (the startup failed) so overall my career is fine.

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#69

Post by mym1990 »

nullorempty wrote: post #62

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

He sure as heck failed at the family thing.

Re: Being ambitious and being a dad

#70

Post by bwest87 »

I am in nearly the exact same boat as the OP. I'll observe a few things after having 2 kids and running a startup at the same time for a few years...

* Your amount of "lost" time with kids is often less than you think. On one side, you very likely socialized more, traveled more, were less disciplined about what you worked on, etc. On another side, some things that you are going to do anyway (dishes, maybe calling your parents, groceries), you can often do with kids, and so this time isn't really "lost"

* If you are fortunate enough to have some means, you might consider not outsourcing parenting, but outsourcing "life admin" work. Specifically things like laundry, dishes, buying groceries, picking up around the house, etc. I recently got someone to come to our house 3x / week for 3 hours and it's a game changer for me and my wife (who also works). (I know my point above says you can do some of this with kids, and that's kind of true, but not always, and it still lets you do other things with your time)

* Assuming you have a partner, and the premise here is you still want to be a very active parent, then I recommend being very deliberate about almost never parenting together. As in, one of you take all the kids, and the other can do what they want for 1-4 hours at a time.

Lastly, while I'm a pretty active dad myself, I reject the premise put forth here that your job is to maximize the time spent with your kids, as if this is the main metric by which parenting success should be judged. Just no. Actively no. Kids having time alone and with their own friends outside of the eye or ear of their parents is a really important part of growing up. Kids having time with various caregivers who are not their parents (be that grandparents, aunts, uncles, friend's parents, camp counselors, babysitters) is also good and healthy.

The struggle is real though. There's no easy answer. Hope these thoughts help!

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