I’ll be honest. This is my second attempt at writing about careers and parenting.
Last week, I nixed 1,500 incoherent words on the topic just before publishing. I tried to summarize all of my thoughts about work in one post, and it read like an acid trip diary. I’m a harsh self-critic, so I gave my wife a rare pre-read to keep me honest. She said “it’s good,” which was enough to know that it was really not good.
So, let’s try this again. I’ve thought more about my career recently than at any other point in my adult life, for a few different reasons.
First, my LinkedIn is currently a war zone. Recent layoffs across Big Tech and other millennial-rich industries have flooded my timeline with a constant stream of sad announcements from my peers. The bizarre and brief fallout from 2020 aside, this is the first time since 2008 (when most of us were young) that my generation has had to seriously worry about job security.
Second, I’ve mentioned how I’m experiencing this reawakening of ambition. I promise that I hate how that sounds as much as you do. It’s hard to know if this is being driven by ego, the search for fulfillment, being in my 30s, or some combination of things, but I feel more motivated than ever to do more, whatever that means.
Finally, and most importantly, is that I’m a dad. I think about work because it impacts everything I’m able to do as a parent. My ability to provide. The time I spend with my kids. The relief it provides after a weekend with my family. (I’m joking. Maybe.) But I also think a lot about what being a dad means from the perspective of what I’m not able to do.
I’m at a point in my life where the drunk “dude, we should start a company” conversations have (mostly) evolved into more tangible discussions of professional opportunity. I am now also old enough to fully recognize that I knew nothing in my 20s and still have so much left to learn, which weirdly makes me a lot more dangerous. From a maturity and humility perspective, it’s the perfect time to hit the gas. But pragmatically, with two babies in tow, it might also be the worst.
I just restarted therapy after a nearly three-year hiatus. I’m a huge proponent of it and think it can be especially helpful during major transition phases. Some of my toughest moments as a dad have been when I’ve tried to do more but absolutely couldn’t, when I was spread too thin to chase all of my professional dreams while living up to my own standards of being a parent.
This can be a suffocating experience. It can be a lonely experience. And it all stems from the sudden shift in balance that occurs when becoming a parent.
After explaining this tension between wanting to do so much but only having so much to give, my therapist said something really powerful.
Sometimes we have to slow down to keep moving forward.
What really is work-life balance?
Almost every parent I talk to says that they underestimated the sacrifices involved in balancing work and family life. Like everything else with kids, you just simply can’t understand the gravity of the situation until you’re in the mud.
A few weeks ago, I reached out to a mentor to ask how he’s approached the topic throughout his career. Since graduate school, he’s traveled 200+ days per year for almost 20 years. His kids are now all in or about to enter college, and he’s missed a lot of important moments. He’s moved his family around the country four different times, always away from support systems. And he’s worked exceptionally hard to get where he is, often spending evenings at home not truly at home.
What worked for him was, of course, setting expectations. Prior to kids, he and his wife discussed and understood the tradeoffs that came with this level of professional ambition. They decided that they would be able to stay true to their parenting values despite the challenges and compromises that came with this lifestyle. This was a deliberate choice, and one that they believed would set themselves and their family up for success in the future.
This isn’t a unique story, but it does feel like one option of a binary decision. If you want to be the best at what you do and be recognized for it with money and status, you have to make significant sacrifices to get there. And if you want to be the most present parent that you can be, you, too, have to concede that your most ambitious professional dreams might not be possible in the way you once imagined them. At least not right now.
There are obviously exceptions to this rule, and the paths are clearly not binary. But I’ve found some peace in slowing down and reframing my career within the broader context of my life.
It’s okay that now is not the perfect time. And it’s okay if I can’t check every item off my list. These sacrifices might not really be sacrifices at all. They just represent a change in priorities as my focus turns to more critically important things. Things that have cataclysmic meltdowns next to my home office while I play Russian roulette with Zoom calls and naptime.
Along the same lines, I’ve tried to be more thoughtful about answering questions that will help guide my career, including:
What do I value most in life and what will it take (professionally) to have more of it?
How physically present do I want to be in the lives of my kids at every stage of their development?
What sacrifices do I need to make for my family to successfully accommodate two working parents?
How will I cope with the impact of those sacrifices, specifically as it relates to my own professional trajectory?
What are my views on childcare and can I afford it because holy fuck it is expensive?
When I reflect on my career and contributions to the world, what will make me proud and what can I do without?
The answers to these questions are fluid. They have to be. But when I reflect on who I am, what’s important to me now, and where I want to be in the future, I know that now is not the time to speed things up.
In the present, my most important role is as Dada. Everything else will come in due time.
Kid highlight of the week
We’ve started making some progress on the misuse of first and second-person pronouns. The toddler is sneaking in I’s, Me’s, and My’s more regularly, almost like she’s speaking a hybrid language.
Separately, she hates to have her hair washed. It is, without failure, her most intense protest every week. There was no traumatic experience. Just a lot of curly hair that requires occasional washing and a stubborn kid who has decided to die on this hill.
We skipped a bath last night because she got to stay up late and play with her grandparents, who came over for dinner. This evening, we told her that she was due for a bath and had to head to the tub after she finished eating.
Like clockwork, she asked, “do you (I) have to wash hair?” My wife said no, and then she delivered the most perfectly pronouned sentence of her life:
“Good. Because I would scream if you washed my hair.”
As someone struggling to balance my (lack of) children and my (lack of) career ambition, I really related to this. Here's hoping you continue to be a great dad but also work hard enough to become an NBA GM and hire your college friends.
You’ve not done a good job at examining your work/life balance unless you also compare yourself to peers who have similar numbers of children, are more successful in their careers, coach their kids sports teams, volunteer in the classroom, cook vegetarian meals that children love at pot lucks, AND go door to door to protect democracy, attend zoning committee hearings, and are competitive in 5k races while pushing kids in a baby jogger. Oh yeah… and the worst thing is that they are often nice people so you can’t hate them as much as you’d like to. If we could find justification to deport those people, the rest of would not have to be so hard on ourselves.