The passionate hunger to do something significant and meaningful with my life was a major reason I took care never to have any children. Having grown up in a large family within a religious subculture full of other large families, the amount of time and attention children consume was crystal clear from a young age, and I knew that I was going to need every scrap of energy I could spare for the work I wanted to do.
Years later, after I had to accept the failure of my ambitions, there was an opportunity to become the dad of a kid who needed one. So here I am being a dad after all, and it's been a good experience. Difficult, of course, and often frustrating, but worthwhile; I have no regrets - neither about this choice, nor the one I made when I was young.
Thanks for sharing! I remember thinking pre-kids mostly about how much work they would be but not really considering the joy they bring too. Like I knew they would, but vastly underestimated what effect that would have on my life.
I don't particularly regret any of my choices either, but knowing what I do now, would have chosen to have kids earlier in my life.
I find it funny that I spent my 20s and 30s doing everything in my power to avoid having kids and at this stage in my life I’m doing everything to have kids.
I do feel that 30 year old me would definitely be in better shape to chase kids around.
I think one of the reasons that a lot of successful founders are in their mid-40s is because they combine 20ish years of experience with an empty nest after kids are out on their own.
> Having grown up in a large family within a religious subculture full of other large families, the amount of time and attention children consume was crystal clear
Similar experience here growing up Mennonite (they’re sorta like the Amish but more moderate).
I’m one of the only remaining men in my family without kids, but those that do have kids (and there’s a lot of them) are super busy. This is at least partially offset by their wives who are more on the traditional side.
I got sort of lucky early in my career because I had a talent that was discovered in a national network. Which meant I found myself writing national strategies for IT in our public sector (Denmark) at my late 20ies. It felt great for a year, or maybe two. When it stopped being fun though, it sort of hit me hard. I did enjoy writing and working on the strategies with other people. All the "glamour" around it, advicing politicians, going to conferences, networking with all sorts of "important" people. That got to me on one of the many train rides I had to take. I know a 3 hour commute might not be a lot to Americans or people in larger countries in general, but here it's a life time. Eventually I didn't know why I was going on them, so I quit and went back to being a nerd in a basement. Having my first child was the kick I needed to push me to where I was already heading though. I would've likely ridden the career ladder for a lot longer if I hadn't become a dad.
I rarely speak about it but something about reading you accepting the failure of your ambitions made me want to do it. Are you sure it's a failure? For me family life turned out to be what I wanted and work is just a fun place which makes me money, but I totally get why people want to do it the opposite way. In some ways you could say that I did something significant, but it made me misserable. So I failed just as much as you, if not more.
I don't regret any of it either though. It's what made me who I am.
I don’t respect any of this. If you can’t find time to create a genetic legacy what is the point of creating something significant in the world. Couple that with taking care of someone else’s kid and all of that seems supremely unpalatable. Whatever downvote and flag me but someone needs to say it.
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 friends and TV shows subtracting from my time.
Today, my life priorities are kids, work and sleep.
There is no Netflix. There are no hobbies. No downtime. No friends unless I happen to like my kids friends parents.
I’m up at 5:30/6 and get 90 mins of focused work in. Skip breakfast. Then workout and walk/bike with the kids. Then ready for work at 10 - and thankfully my office is two blocks away. Skip lunch. Home at 5/5:30. Dinner with kids and play. Work from 8-10. Every single day.
I love my kids, work and learning is fun, and I value sleep. Everything else is a nice to have.
The way I see it, when I’m 100 years old I won’t regret drag on my ambitions because I had kids. In fact I’ll probably think the ambitions were nice but kind of pointless in the end anyway. I will see the kids as important and meaningful, and will write a life story where I was the best dad I could be and still hustled like hell.
Intermittent fasting and calorie reduction are the only known way to EXTEND lifespan and wellness. 10 years of low carb + fasting is the single most important health decision I have ever made.
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.
Granted, I do need to take a break from that schedule every so often. If I catch myself being unfocused I just go to bed.
Also, the first thing I work on is usually a high leverage project that excites me. Reading news or answering emails (things that can affect my emotions) are usually avoided during that time. Usually.
Man good motivating schedule. Are you married as well? I notice this is missing the wife time. I feel like I really have to wreck my sleep to get worktime between wife and kids.
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 chance to reflect before they die, would choose more time with the people they care about than more time working, even if, in the moment, they felt they were doing a good job balancing the two.
I think this is the point though right? The author is saying that he rejects this dichotomy and he's attempting to take on both even if others might perceive it as impossible.
"Behind every great man there's a great woman." I thought I was killing it at work and as a dad when I was answering emails about complex bugs while hiking with my first kid riding in a backpack. But then I quit working to be a full-time dad for kid #2 and found out how much work my partner had been doing that I didn't know about. I suddenly understood why so many of the men at my former workplace had been divorced. So be ambitious, but check in with your partner and make sure they are on the same page.
"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 aspire to be... and those are my role models. Not the ones who abandon their kids or wife to pursue their own dreams and make excessive amounts of money.
If you really can only muster enough time or energy to be ambitious about one thing, be ambitious within your home/family.
I would also add that, at least in my experience, those who are professionally ambitious and maximizing professional success, while being highly confident they are also succeeding at home, often have an inaccurate view of their home life. It's not until the kids are grown and openly fighting their demons that they realize the bargain that they made.
It's that old adage of, anyone who thinks they're a great parent, probably isn't. And almost all kids would be happier with a less wealthy (or even poorer) upbringing, and a tighter family.
The number of wives who have complained to me privately about the lack of family commitment of rock star husbands whom everyone admires (often precisely for their apparent family commitment) was a real eye-opener.
I'm not convinced that stratospheric success in business is very often compatible with high levels of parental and spousal involvement. It is sometimes, but those are anomalies we shouldn't build our fairy tales around. I know very few old-timers who wish they'd spent less time with their families when they could have made the difference of a lifetime.
There’s a pretty interesting self-help book that is designed to help couples share domestic and family work equally; I thought it was an interesting read. It makes exactly the same point about rockstar husbands that contribute less than their spouses.
The central idea is a set of 100 cards representing various tasks that are necessary for running a household, that you split up between the two partners. Supposedly women tend to hold ~80 of the cards in most relationships.
The online discourse around this book can be kinda vitriolic (lots of examples of it starting arguments) but I do think that it’s a good starting point if you want to genuinely try to contribute equally.
This is a conversation that ambitious women have been having for decades. To the point where it's a cliche. Having it about men and women is valuable, having it be about them separately I think masks some of the structural problems- e.g. better childcare, more and better laid out parental leave(1), etc.
Two things I've heard from different ambitious women: "To really achieve, you need a wife" is something I've heard a lot- that it takes one parent sacrificing some of their career priority; traditionally that was the woman but it in theory could be the man (2), it just rarely is.
The other thing an ambitious woman told me once is that her mom told her "husband, career, kids, pick two." Basically, there is just only enough energy for a given person per day to invest in two of them. I've seen some women who managed, from the outside, to at least look successful at all three, but it's rare indeed.
1: When my kid was born the software company I worked for (I'm an American at an American company, but this was an area of competition for software devs at the time) offered a 14 week paid parental leave, even for men. Most men took a four week ("secondary caregiver" leave) and overlapped it with their wives 12 week unpaid FMLA. I took mine (14 week "primary caregiver") after my wife's leave expired, such that our kid had one of us caring for him every moment of his first six months. I remain convinced that was absolutely vital as the basis for both my relationship with my son and with my wife- she had to rely on me, trust me to care for the kid, and I couldn't hand him off, it was all on me every day. And so we both developed the parental muscles, could trust that the other one understood the reality of the situation, in a way that many father's don't get a chance. And that experience convinced me that the US needs maternal leave, obviously, but it also needs paternity leave- and the policies need to be designed such that the woman has to be back at work for at least some of the paternity leave, it can't all be used concurrently.
2: In a recent survey of American households https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr... about 55% of American heterosexual marriages the man makes 60% or more of the household income, about 30% both halves of the couple were between 40-60%, and just 16% saw the woman make more than 60% of the household income. In the majority of the 16% the woman still spent more time on unpaid household chores and carework than the man they were out-earning. Only in the 6% of heterosexual marriages where the woman earned 100% of the income did the number of hours per week in unpaid labor of men even equal that of their female partner.
I think the point that my friend's mom was making to her was that for a woman (with significantly higher social expectations for the amount of care work and housework) you can only be good at two of the three, because you are a human being with a finite amount of time and energy.
As for how you end up with just those two, I think the answer is divorce: you don't spend the energy to maintain your relationship with your spouse. Before you had kids you could invest your time and energy in your spouse and your career, then the kids come along and your relationship with your spouse weakens, either all the way to divorce or to just a degraded state.
Yeah I can accept that point of view. I think this is highlighting a certain relationship expectation delta between men (or at least myself) and women (or some women). If my wife is doing well in her career and we are doing well with the kids, I could easily see this being considered ‘good’, but my wife may view the relationship as being neglected. I see the core functions working and consider the relationship doing well.
This situation is in development for me so we will see. 0 and 3 year old
Yeah, this is also what I see as the main threat to my relationship with my wife: my complacency, taking it and her for granted. We both work hard on our parenting our 9 year old, and our careers, but then you need to spend the time with each other, lest you become roommates who run an unpaid childcare service on the side.
And I do wonder if this is about the engineer mindset ('I've reduced this to a previously solved problem, I just let the subroutine handle it') or about the way that men are socialized in my culture (take her out to dinner twice a year- Mother's Day and Valentine's- and remember her birthday and you're meeting social expectations) or what. But it's the biggest threat to my (and I'd hazard a guess most other) marriages.
I've started peering behind the curtains when I get the chance, and I've not yet found someone wildly successful who is also a model parent. Time after time, their spouse is quietly shouldering an enormous load, or their children spin their wheels and wind up rudderless, etc.
You can certainly be successful and be a good parent, but one of the first steps is recognizing and picking out the false prophets. You can't hold yourself to a superhuman standard, which is what a parent maximizing career while letting family malinger will present. They will say, Look at me, a captain of industry with vaults of gold, who has the physique of a twenty-five year old and is also an all-star parent. And you have to figure out that it's a lie.
One little clue - start to notice: of your professional idols who are good parents and seem to have it all, how many have a spouse working a demanding full time job as well? I realized for me it was zero.
Unfortunately, I think that this is possible, but it requires a superhuman well of energy, sleep deficit tolerance, and benevolence that very very few people possess. :/
> 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 status-quo not only screws with the future of our own specie but also a bunch of others which may go extinct because of our greed
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.
I have a good friend who has a special needs kid and we've discussed his struggles at length - suffice it to say that it takes an order of magnitude more time and attention than what's described here.
The thing is, you of course don't get tipped off that you've been selected for that particular curse (and yes, I'd say it's a curse. It's not some inspiring after-school special thing, it's unfair as f*k to all involved).
The point of this is, I suppose, it's okay to choose not to have kids if you don't feel like gambling, because it turns out, you are. And I say this as someone who is very in favor of having kids and who worries about the looming population collapse in all developed countries.
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 ?
The middle way, perhaps? What "dreams" are more important than having a strong connection with your kids? Not only are the regrets that will come later in life huge and legitimate, they would also be irreversible. But, assuming you're in relatively good health midlife, you can always attempt to build the 5 startups that will almost definitely fail. Just my opinion of course.
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.
This resonates a lot with how I felt while building our company. My kids were born during the early days of our startup and it was pretty much what he described- work and being a dad. Thankfully the startup was pretty successful and I made a good amount of money that’s allowed me the luxury of not having to work when the older one was 10. I am really enjoying not working and being a full time dad :-)
“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?
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!
Yes. Before I became a dad, I didn't realize how physically and financially constrained people are with regards to number of kids that they have. For me and my wife, our first child took all our time, resources and energy.
This was a shock to me because my parents had 4 children and never seemed to struggle. Also, they were much better off than me financially and could afford to hire help.
My biggest achievement as a dad is the fact that my son speaks 3 languages. In spite of the fact that I was working full time, he still learned to speak my native language fluently from me. And I still did house chores too. And still worked on side hustles at night and weekends.
But yes, I had no life at all for 5 years straight. No life at all. I'm a shell of my former self. My main concern is that I'm showing my son a bad example of how a dad should be. I literally can't afford to raise him with the same values as I was raised with... Because he would grow up into someone like me and that would be my greatest fear.
Now I understand why some parents spoil their children and focus 100% on boosting the child's confidence. This is what you have to do if you're poor. Because you need your child to believe they are above you. That way when they see how shit your life is, they don't have to believe theirs will also end up like this.
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.
First definition of ambition in merriam webster is "an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power." Ambition is basically definitionally antisocial.
A desire to accumulate power is tantamount to a desire to accumulate wealth. Most ways to wealth these days involve finding ways to consume more of the world's resources or siphon resources to yourself.
Consider refining word choice. (Though if your notion of ambition corresponds to building a sillycon valley startup, then 'ambition' is probably the right word.) I don't mean that nothing good ever comes of technology; I mean that VC-funded startup tech is mostly done in the pursuit of money, damn any social consequences.
Having extreme career success (like the kind referred to in the article) is basically a lottery ticket. I spend a lot of time with my kids, because I figure even if I halve my chances of winning the lottery, well, the odds haven’t changed that much, all considered.
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.
'Ambitious' often means doing optional things that take time.
A single person who cuts back on time spent doom scrolling / tv watching / beer drinking to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices is ambitious.
A new parent who cuts back on time with their kids to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices needs their head checked.
I’m far less ambitious, but not less driven. It’s just that what I’m driving for is to maximize time doing things I and my family enjoy. In fact it’s a lens through which I analyze jobs and career opportunities.
Maybe ambitious is not the right word. It's more like, at some point you have to go home.
Before my kids, I started at sunrise, and coming home was optional. Then I got married and divided my attention. Then I got twins, so I divided it even more. But it doesn't make me any less ambitious, in fact, I have more fire behind me to ensure I give them a bright future. It's just that, I come home on time now.
Edit: and thank you for writing this post. It's rarely something we mention in our personal blogs, but it's always nice to know how diverse this culture is.
Exactly. If he means successful instead, then we can have different definitions of successful. That being said, I don't think most startup founders have the same definition of successful as that meets: dad that wants to be there for their children.
The weird thing is how most of the comments here are from dads saying it's hard but worth it in various ways. I've been scrolling for a while and failed to find an alternative point of view.
This essay feels like the 2010s when feminists were debating if it were possible as a women to "have it all": successful/satisfying career, family, and personal life.
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.
Uh, I think at the very least you have to caveat on the age of the kids. Babies need a lot of fussy obsessiveness. Kids arms aren’t long enough for them to wipe their own ass until they’re about 4. Don’t know when you get them to start doing laundry or dishes but that takes longer still.
Watching my kid grow up I realise that despite the modern world having/wanting so many kids we really don't build affordances for them.
Most kids 5-8 at the family dinner table are trying to eat from a plate at shoulder height. No wonder they don't care about cutlery use. It's pretty hard to put downwards force on a knife that is at shoulder height, let alone coordinate all the minor muscle movements required.
The bathroom sink in most houses, similar height, and they struggle to reach taps and soap.
Little stools abound around the home!
But then you go out and public toilets have hand driers right next to their head. No surprise they complain it is too damn loud!
In a world where we supposedly want kids, if for no other reason than to keep society going, we sure don't make it easy for them.
It shouldn't be hard though. For me personally, I'm mostly friends with other dads with kids and I do my hobbies (music, rock climbing, skiing) with my kids. It's not that difficult.
In college, I burned out on normal coursework and dropped out to teach myself how to code instead. To support myself, I worked in restaurants. I found that working as a dishwasher was quite complementary to learning to code. It was tiring physically, but I ended each day in need of mental stimulation, so went home and coded all night.
Now, as a father, I've found there's a similar complementarity in some ways but not others. There's a huge physical component to parenting, and this is perfectly complementary. There's also an emotional aspect (sometimes 2 or even 3 cry at once). This can be complementary or not depending on how much emotional labor work required (usually very little).
The one area where both work and kids is exhausting is attention. A toddler demands a huge amount of attention, and performing at work does too.
Well said. I hope some day to make it and start parent.capital a place where parents can get funding. I believe there are thousands of people out there with great ideas and immense talent who are unable to leave their salary and benefits behind to pursue them.
When you become a parent, your risk profile changes immensely. I can hire some of the world’s best people tomorrow if i can promise them equal salary, benefits and retirement accounts for a set number of years. Plus the benefit of a large upside if it works. Most startups offer lower salaries and abysmal benefits. Security matters.
I still don’t get it. It sounds like the business plan is to fund companies so they can offer compelling employment. That’s great but that’s no different than any other VC.
Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenting quality from the outside, but he talks about his kids a lot.
In his case, I think he didn’t start his company until his kids were older. I’m not sure what the early childhood years were like for him.
thank you for this, very well written, and rings true.
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.
Ultimately any two ambitions will compete with each other for finite time and energy. (Assuming each ambition benefits from more time and energy being spent on it, which is usually the case.)
You can be reasonably successful in multiple areas, but you can't max them all, you have to compromise somehow.
A lot of good stuff in this thread. The party I'll add and haven't seen yet is that I think being a dad has made me a better people manager at work. I think about humans more than ever and that has helped make me more efficient at work
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.
Reality check: this guy worked on "Mocha is an online AI powered app builder. It allows everyone to build web apps, no coding required"
He 'loves' building. Building what? Crypto thing when crypto is hot and AI thing when AI is hot? Is there a word to describe this behaviour that we may be familiar with?
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!
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.
I would only add that if increasing general family cohesion is one of your goals, I think having lots of kids accomplishes that. Having a large family and multiple automatic life long best friends brings me so much joy.
Many years before becoming a Dad, I recall watching a video recorded by the Penny Arcade web cartoon folks while working where they reflected on both becoming fathers and asked themselves if it had been a net drain on their productivity and creativity.
They both concluded (not quickly, they discussed it) no, because it forced both of them to level up their time management game, quit whining and learn to get on with it, to the point where they generally got more done a couple of years in.
I have found this to be true. Our little one is turning 3 in November, and while the first two years were a bit slower (I took half a year of work while my wife finished up her Master's, etc.), in 2026 I've so far had a fantastic year and find myself much more capable of juggling more balls at the same time, finally learned the skill of grabbing sleep where I can, etc. I'm pretty sure I already "had my act together" (as per the article) and was doing well career-wise, but raising the stakes on the family side has definitely only improved things.
Got a whole lot of Open Source work done, reverse engineered an old cult video game I used to play, wrote HMI and firmware for a robot used in the Great Pyramid of Egypt for a scientific mission, taught myself GPRs and built a new radar control system, spent a week rolling around in the dust of millenia inside Khufu's Pyramid, etc., all next to the day job.
The most unexpected professional/skills growth and fun year I've had in a while, and it's all so much more meaningful when I get to share it with the little one.
I agree with this. Especially as you gain experience and your work becomes less day to day grunt work and more high level strategic thinking, having constraints on time actually has been beneficial for me.
Taking work problems into other spheres of my life, especially parenting, gives me distance and a new lens to view them through.
I'm a father. Best thing I ever did, but it is work, it is hard.
In ways, it really crisped up my time working on work. My wife and I have some bottom lines, we're invovled, we have dinner as a family every day. We go to school events, all of them. We go to sports and activities, all of them (although there have been some times we had to split up and each to a different one.) I'm at the table when my kids have breakfast, every day except when I travel for work which is a week or two per quarter. It's great for the kids, it's great for the family but suddenly it feelds like your day is shorter. Personally, I have tried to find other "thought time" and that has resulted in much better execution when I get to writing code or plans or whatever. I used to sit at the blank editor and start to compose but now I am forced to think more before hand. I've built a few things I honestly don't think I could have built before kids, just out of necessity, I've had to be more efficient and effective.
There are also times of utter exhaustion but I had those before kids. I'll also went through the process of sort of cutting out extras to make time, once your kids are in that 10-11 age, they'll have friends and interests, I've added some of those extras back because they are busy on Sunday afternoons or whenever.
I had roughly the same realization about the pillars of math & science years ago. Many terrible, terrible parents whose children suffered mightily. While I had aspired to intellectual impact all my life, I had an unexpected realization. I could not bear the thought of being famous and intellectually successful yet having totally failed my children. It reversed my longstanding priorities, and I realized I wanted to be a parent more than I had thought.
I still believe that having passionate and driven parents is good for kids.
> setting clear rules on time with kids (weekday dinners, weekends prioritize family) and
Are these examples or an exhaustive list? Eating dinner during the week is.. not a lot. So I assume it's about setting time limits for these activities?
A somewhat unpopular opinion, but personally I don't mind being kind of absent in my kids' lives relative to others' expectations. I think there's been some expectation creep around parental involvement for high-achieving couples without much concrete evidence that it hurts long-term outcomes, assuming the child is otherwise healthy and well taken care of. There's also something to be said for leaning on grandparents and other support structures more heavily than a lot of people currently do.
One "superpower" from being married with kids is that your life becomes a lot more predictable. Like, having sex regularly and spending quality family time is probably a healthy part of a balanced, productive lifestyle, and is a good counterbalance to the stresses of a demanding career - it's nice not to always be thinking about how you're going to get laid, or in the event that you do become successful, whether or not your partner is just gold digging you or something. Although a lot of that depends on who you marry and making sure you're both doing good maintenance.
I think the difference between your opinion and others is that for many being a dad is the intention and not an expectation. They want the experience of being an active and present parent. If it were purely about obligation, in this day and age they probably just wouldn't have children.
For what it's worth, I had a "high-achieving" dad. The big house, going on vacation and all that jazz was nice, sure. My grandparents and the support system were cool too. I consider the grandma who raised us while he worked like my second mother. I definitely would have preferred to get to spend a lot more time with him before he got old. Cause he is now, that wheel ain't turning back, and I barely got to know him. He was present as much as he could with the career he chose.
We turned out okay, no major problems with any of us, decent careers, whatever. I guess we probably wouldn't have turned out much better. So yeah, I guess there wouldnt have been much in terms of better "outcome". Still, my siblings have voiced the same regret. I genuinely think he does too. The expectation of being more present than he was is one I give myself, not "expectation creep".
> without much concrete evidence that it hurts long-term outcomes, assuming the child is otherwise healthy and well taken care of.
Not to pick on others’ life choices, but I don’t think that this particular assertion is true. Depends on your evidentiary bar, I suppose, but just from googling it:
* Mass General’s Fatherhood Project (https://thefatherhoodproject.org/schools/the-research/): “Findings from the rapidly growing science of early childhood and brain development show that a father’s active participation and emotional engagement with his children leads to improved social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes.”
Weekday dinners? Pff.. I'm 100x better parent, and probably 100x less productive. But my employer is happy with me, I'm happy too, and my wife and kids too. So happy, I do not need to write articles about it.
Money can solve most of these problems? Send your kid to daycare, hire a nanny or two and then the world will believe you can be a great father and ambitious and successful in your career. They do not see the village taking care of your kid while you are busy with work
> Some figures in technology (Paul Graham, DHH, Jeff Dean, even Mark Zuckerberg) seem to be pushing on both fronts with rare success
Possibly true, but who knows. Especially Zuck, who does not lead a remotely ordinary life (imo).
Dad of 2 girls. 8 and 4. Maybe this should be titled “being ambitious because you’re a dad”
I am better than ever post kids. Always great, no. Always amazing, no. Not sure I agree with the post otherwise, especially quality vs quantity. High quality interactions are the best.
I believed this idea of kids = dead dreams for a long time. I don't think it's true. I think the author of the blog is letting his particular interests and cherry-picked examples cloud his judgment.
If you look beyond the narrow sphere of technology and founders, you'll find many of humanity's greats had kids, or more broadly, family responsibilities, at some point. Their ability and involvement as parents varies widely, but this idea that kids are some kind of an inevitable death-knell for "being successful" or renowned whatever that means, isn't true.
An alternative lens would suggest that having kids reveals a lot about life that you can use in your other pursuits.
Your kids also eventually become adults, at which point the demands likely lower significantly.
Just like the "starving artist" myth, it's mostly baloney hyperbole that people promulgate because there's some obvious basic truth to it, but it isn't a law of the universe by any means.
We have one life and so much we want to do. This was me, now I have kids. Wake up, read news reply to email. Get kids ready for school. From drop off at school straight to work, from work straight to pickup the kids.
My working hours are 6-9 most days. Wish I had more hours in the day.
What really stands out reading this piece is how different this attitude is than what we as a society thought 50 years ago. The great men name-dropped in the article surely had more on their plates than the average 1960s middle manager at G.E., or corporate attorney, or advertising agency VP, or shift manager at a Ford plant, and thus were surely more absent parents than their contemporaries. But in that era, fathers didn't even lose any sleep over it. It was just accepted that their primary role was to bring home as much money as possible to pay for a better life for their family, and if you're lucky to leave a legacy as a builder of great things or organizations. It was the mother's job to raise the children (or in the wealthiest families, perhaps that fell to the nanny(s) while the mother focused on socializing or hobbies).
In two generations, we've gone from that to most dads constantly asking themselves "Am I a good enough dad? How could I be better?" Fathers feel that they aren't good enough if they merely provide for a good life for their family and set a good example. They try to find a way to, while of course not dropping the ball at all on the provider role, also be a 'fun dad' and a friend to their kids and be deeply involved in their lives.
I would say this is also kind of a mirror image to women's very real struggle post-1980 or so -- before, you were absolutely acknowledged to be a success if you cared well for the next generation of children and taught them to be good people. Some would say (and still do) that's one of the most important callings. Now women worry that they're not good enough unless they - without missing a beat on that first mission - also have an impactful and meaningful commercial career.
This isn't arguing to force people to perform only one sex-prescribed role or anything. And I don't want any parents to just be absent, because frankly being there for your kid is incredibly rewarding. I'm just saying, I think it's an insane amount of pressure we put on mothers AND fathers to be everything to everyone both within the family and in the professional world.
This is something that makes me really sad, because as an extremely ambitious man, I've found it difficult to make friends with men who are similarly ambitious. It seems that everyone gives up once they have a kid and becomes a helicopter parent. I like to think I'm a good dad (have four kids; work from home; regularly do sports, music, etc with them; cook regularly) and also pretty ambitious (work in a MAANA company, have side businesses and gigs, have a good marriage, hobbies, exercise, etc), but it's difficult to find other dads into this. Or at least that's my perception here in Portland, OR. I've met a few, but most ambitious people seem uninterested in kids, and the ones interested in kids seem thoroughly unambitious in my opinion.
In 100 years nobody will know who you were. In 200 years, only a few hundred people will be remembered from today. So what is the goal of your ambition? Is it the self-satisfaction? Temporary bragging rights that will be soon forgotten? Whatever wealth you accumulate, you can't take it with you. The pharoahs already trie this. It doesn't work.
Nobody's going to give a shit that you founded an AI company and sold it to Meta for $600 million. Sure you can enjoy the material benefits while you're here. Maybe you can even pass some of that onto your children.
The Good Place was one of the best TV shows of the best shows of the last decade (IMHO) and it brought up a relatively recent (1998) book "What we owe to each other". It makes the point that it's not a question (ie "what do we owe to each other?"). You're only meaningful impact is on the people you affect around you, positively or negatively.
Personally, I have no opinion on whether people should or shouldn't have children. That's none of my business other than this: you have to make a choice between having and raising those children and chasing material "ambitions". Bringing people into the world without their consent and then neglecting them makes you an objectively terrible person. Pick a lane.
And if you do choose ambition instead, at least ask yourself why. Studies have been done on this. Money does buy happiness but only to a very limited point. Beyond that it's isolating. So why are you doing whatever it is you're ambitious about, really?
I don't know if I'm ambitious. I've worked my way to a high-paying tech job I enjoy. I'm not looking to found a startup or job-hop my way to a fancy title, and plan to stay here until I retire if I can. On the other hand, I put a lot of effort into my work, not because I'm angling for a promotion but because I like what I do and I want to do the best I can for the users.
Does that count as ambition? Doesn't really matter. The basic tension described here is strong, in any case, between work and family.
Earnestly: LLM hosting companies allow easy exchange of money for relatively nuanced language processing. Great power for filtering text anywhere you have the need.
Years later, after I had to accept the failure of my ambitions, there was an opportunity to become the dad of a kid who needed one. So here I am being a dad after all, and it's been a good experience. Difficult, of course, and often frustrating, but worthwhile; I have no regrets - neither about this choice, nor the one I made when I was young.
I don't particularly regret any of my choices either, but knowing what I do now, would have chosen to have kids earlier in my life.
I do feel that 30 year old me would definitely be in better shape to chase kids around.
Nothing to back it up, but it makes sense to me.
Similar experience here growing up Mennonite (they’re sorta like the Amish but more moderate).
I’m one of the only remaining men in my family without kids, but those that do have kids (and there’s a lot of them) are super busy. This is at least partially offset by their wives who are more on the traditional side.
They all do seem very fulfilled however :)
I rarely speak about it but something about reading you accepting the failure of your ambitions made me want to do it. Are you sure it's a failure? For me family life turned out to be what I wanted and work is just a fun place which makes me money, but I totally get why people want to do it the opposite way. In some ways you could say that I did something significant, but it made me misserable. So I failed just as much as you, if not more.
I don't regret any of it either though. It's what made me who I am.
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 friends and TV shows subtracting from my time.
Today, my life priorities are kids, work and sleep.
There is no Netflix. There are no hobbies. No downtime. No friends unless I happen to like my kids friends parents.
I’m up at 5:30/6 and get 90 mins of focused work in. Skip breakfast. Then workout and walk/bike with the kids. Then ready for work at 10 - and thankfully my office is two blocks away. Skip lunch. Home at 5/5:30. Dinner with kids and play. Work from 8-10. Every single day.
I love my kids, work and learning is fun, and I value sleep. Everything else is a nice to have.
The way I see it, when I’m 100 years old I won’t regret drag on my ambitions because I had kids. In fact I’ll probably think the ambitions were nice but kind of pointless in the end anyway. I will see the kids as important and meaningful, and will write a life story where I was the best dad I could be and still hustled like hell.
Also, the first thing I work on is usually a high leverage project that excites me. Reading news or answering emails (things that can affect my emotions) are usually avoided during that time. Usually.
No, why would you think that?
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 chance to reflect before they die, would choose more time with the people they care about than more time working, even if, in the moment, they felt they were doing a good job balancing the two.
this is true for me, wouldn't be remotely possible without my wife.
The real heroes are the ones ambitiously raising the next generation while changing the world right now. That's what I aspire to be... and those are my role models. Not the ones who abandon their kids or wife to pursue their own dreams and make excessive amounts of money.
If you really can only muster enough time or energy to be ambitious about one thing, be ambitious within your home/family.
It's that old adage of, anyone who thinks they're a great parent, probably isn't. And almost all kids would be happier with a less wealthy (or even poorer) upbringing, and a tighter family.
The number of wives who have complained to me privately about the lack of family commitment of rock star husbands whom everyone admires (often precisely for their apparent family commitment) was a real eye-opener.
I'm not convinced that stratospheric success in business is very often compatible with high levels of parental and spousal involvement. It is sometimes, but those are anomalies we shouldn't build our fairy tales around. I know very few old-timers who wish they'd spent less time with their families when they could have made the difference of a lifetime.
https://www.fairplaylife.com/the-book
The central idea is a set of 100 cards representing various tasks that are necessary for running a household, that you split up between the two partners. Supposedly women tend to hold ~80 of the cards in most relationships.
The online discourse around this book can be kinda vitriolic (lots of examples of it starting arguments) but I do think that it’s a good starting point if you want to genuinely try to contribute equally.
Two things I've heard from different ambitious women: "To really achieve, you need a wife" is something I've heard a lot- that it takes one parent sacrificing some of their career priority; traditionally that was the woman but it in theory could be the man (2), it just rarely is.
The other thing an ambitious woman told me once is that her mom told her "husband, career, kids, pick two." Basically, there is just only enough energy for a given person per day to invest in two of them. I've seen some women who managed, from the outside, to at least look successful at all three, but it's rare indeed.
1: When my kid was born the software company I worked for (I'm an American at an American company, but this was an area of competition for software devs at the time) offered a 14 week paid parental leave, even for men. Most men took a four week ("secondary caregiver" leave) and overlapped it with their wives 12 week unpaid FMLA. I took mine (14 week "primary caregiver") after my wife's leave expired, such that our kid had one of us caring for him every moment of his first six months. I remain convinced that was absolutely vital as the basis for both my relationship with my son and with my wife- she had to rely on me, trust me to care for the kid, and I couldn't hand him off, it was all on me every day. And so we both developed the parental muscles, could trust that the other one understood the reality of the situation, in a way that many father's don't get a chance. And that experience convinced me that the US needs maternal leave, obviously, but it also needs paternity leave- and the policies need to be designed such that the woman has to be back at work for at least some of the paternity leave, it can't all be used concurrently.
2: In a recent survey of American households https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr... about 55% of American heterosexual marriages the man makes 60% or more of the household income, about 30% both halves of the couple were between 40-60%, and just 16% saw the woman make more than 60% of the household income. In the majority of the 16% the woman still spent more time on unpaid household chores and carework than the man they were out-earning. Only in the 6% of heterosexual marriages where the woman earned 100% of the income did the number of hours per week in unpaid labor of men even equal that of their female partner.
As for how you end up with just those two, I think the answer is divorce: you don't spend the energy to maintain your relationship with your spouse. Before you had kids you could invest your time and energy in your spouse and your career, then the kids come along and your relationship with your spouse weakens, either all the way to divorce or to just a degraded state.
This situation is in development for me so we will see. 0 and 3 year old
And I do wonder if this is about the engineer mindset ('I've reduced this to a previously solved problem, I just let the subroutine handle it') or about the way that men are socialized in my culture (take her out to dinner twice a year- Mother's Day and Valentine's- and remember her birthday and you're meeting social expectations) or what. But it's the biggest threat to my (and I'd hazard a guess most other) marriages.
Being self-aware and self-critical is one of those changes that instantly improves everyone's life around us, including our own.
You can certainly be successful and be a good parent, but one of the first steps is recognizing and picking out the false prophets. You can't hold yourself to a superhuman standard, which is what a parent maximizing career while letting family malinger will present. They will say, Look at me, a captain of industry with vaults of gold, who has the physique of a twenty-five year old and is also an all-star parent. And you have to figure out that it's a lie.
One little clue - start to notice: of your professional idols who are good parents and seem to have it all, how many have a spouse working a demanding full time job as well? I realized for me it was zero.
That's the real problem. People need to stay in their damn lane.
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 status-quo not only screws with the future of our own specie but also a bunch of others which may go extinct because of our greed
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...
Calling having children an ecological offence is like saying that best way to reduce emissions is for all people to die.
The thing is, you of course don't get tipped off that you've been selected for that particular curse (and yes, I'd say it's a curse. It's not some inspiring after-school special thing, it's unfair as f*k to all involved).
The point of this is, I suppose, it's okay to choose not to have kids if you don't feel like gambling, because it turns out, you are. And I say this as someone who is very in favor of having kids and who worries about the looming population collapse in all developed countries.
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 ?
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?
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..."
I love my kids but they take a lot of time. Wouldn't change it for the world though.
This was a shock to me because my parents had 4 children and never seemed to struggle. Also, they were much better off than me financially and could afford to hire help.
My biggest achievement as a dad is the fact that my son speaks 3 languages. In spite of the fact that I was working full time, he still learned to speak my native language fluently from me. And I still did house chores too. And still worked on side hustles at night and weekends.
But yes, I had no life at all for 5 years straight. No life at all. I'm a shell of my former self. My main concern is that I'm showing my son a bad example of how a dad should be. I literally can't afford to raise him with the same values as I was raised with... Because he would grow up into someone like me and that would be my greatest fear.
Now I understand why some parents spoil their children and focus 100% on boosting the child's confidence. This is what you have to do if you're poor. Because you need your child to believe they are above you. That way when they see how shit your life is, they don't have to believe theirs will also end up like this.
A desire to accumulate power is tantamount to a desire to accumulate wealth. Most ways to wealth these days involve finding ways to consume more of the world's resources or siphon resources to yourself.
Consider refining word choice. (Though if your notion of ambition corresponds to building a sillycon valley startup, then 'ambition' is probably the right word.) I don't mean that nothing good ever comes of technology; I mean that VC-funded startup tech is mostly done in the pursuit of money, damn any social consequences.
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.
Can't say this resonates with me. Though being a dad has wildly changed what I'm ambitious about.
A single person who cuts back on time spent doom scrolling / tv watching / beer drinking to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices is ambitious.
A new parent who cuts back on time with their kids to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices needs their head checked.
Before my kids, I started at sunrise, and coming home was optional. Then I got married and divided my attention. Then I got twins, so I divided it even more. But it doesn't make me any less ambitious, in fact, I have more fire behind me to ensure I give them a bright future. It's just that, I come home on time now.
Edit: and thank you for writing this post. It's rarely something we mention in our personal blogs, but it's always nice to know how diverse this culture is.
Someone on X, don't recall who, but it resonated.
Most kids 5-8 at the family dinner table are trying to eat from a plate at shoulder height. No wonder they don't care about cutlery use. It's pretty hard to put downwards force on a knife that is at shoulder height, let alone coordinate all the minor muscle movements required.
The bathroom sink in most houses, similar height, and they struggle to reach taps and soap.
Little stools abound around the home!
But then you go out and public toilets have hand driers right next to their head. No surprise they complain it is too damn loud!
In a world where we supposedly want kids, if for no other reason than to keep society going, we sure don't make it easy for them.
In college, I burned out on normal coursework and dropped out to teach myself how to code instead. To support myself, I worked in restaurants. I found that working as a dishwasher was quite complementary to learning to code. It was tiring physically, but I ended each day in need of mental stimulation, so went home and coded all night.
Now, as a father, I've found there's a similar complementarity in some ways but not others. There's a huge physical component to parenting, and this is perfectly complementary. There's also an emotional aspect (sometimes 2 or even 3 cry at once). This can be complementary or not depending on how much emotional labor work required (usually very little).
The one area where both work and kids is exhausting is attention. A toddler demands a huge amount of attention, and performing at work does too.
Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenting quality from the outside, but he talks about his kids a lot.
In his case, I think he didn’t start his company until his kids were older. I’m not sure what the early childhood years were like for him.
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.
Not because he knew about the tech, though he was learning fast, but because he knew how to wrangle and intermediate the man-children.
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
When he dies, I while track the titles of news articles about the inheritance fight with mild amusement. I won't read the articles however...
He 'loves' building. Building what? Crypto thing when crypto is hot and AI thing when AI is hot? Is there a word to describe this behaviour that we may be familiar with?
* 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!
I would only add that if increasing general family cohesion is one of your goals, I think having lots of kids accomplishes that. Having a large family and multiple automatic life long best friends brings me so much joy.
They both concluded (not quickly, they discussed it) no, because it forced both of them to level up their time management game, quit whining and learn to get on with it, to the point where they generally got more done a couple of years in.
I have found this to be true. Our little one is turning 3 in November, and while the first two years were a bit slower (I took half a year of work while my wife finished up her Master's, etc.), in 2026 I've so far had a fantastic year and find myself much more capable of juggling more balls at the same time, finally learned the skill of grabbing sleep where I can, etc. I'm pretty sure I already "had my act together" (as per the article) and was doing well career-wise, but raising the stakes on the family side has definitely only improved things.
Got a whole lot of Open Source work done, reverse engineered an old cult video game I used to play, wrote HMI and firmware for a robot used in the Great Pyramid of Egypt for a scientific mission, taught myself GPRs and built a new radar control system, spent a week rolling around in the dust of millenia inside Khufu's Pyramid, etc., all next to the day job.
The most unexpected professional/skills growth and fun year I've had in a while, and it's all so much more meaningful when I get to share it with the little one.
Taking work problems into other spheres of my life, especially parenting, gives me distance and a new lens to view them through.
In ways, it really crisped up my time working on work. My wife and I have some bottom lines, we're invovled, we have dinner as a family every day. We go to school events, all of them. We go to sports and activities, all of them (although there have been some times we had to split up and each to a different one.) I'm at the table when my kids have breakfast, every day except when I travel for work which is a week or two per quarter. It's great for the kids, it's great for the family but suddenly it feelds like your day is shorter. Personally, I have tried to find other "thought time" and that has resulted in much better execution when I get to writing code or plans or whatever. I used to sit at the blank editor and start to compose but now I am forced to think more before hand. I've built a few things I honestly don't think I could have built before kids, just out of necessity, I've had to be more efficient and effective.
There are also times of utter exhaustion but I had those before kids. I'll also went through the process of sort of cutting out extras to make time, once your kids are in that 10-11 age, they'll have friends and interests, I've added some of those extras back because they are busy on Sunday afternoons or whenever.
I still believe that having passionate and driven parents is good for kids.
Are these examples or an exhaustive list? Eating dinner during the week is.. not a lot. So I assume it's about setting time limits for these activities?
One "superpower" from being married with kids is that your life becomes a lot more predictable. Like, having sex regularly and spending quality family time is probably a healthy part of a balanced, productive lifestyle, and is a good counterbalance to the stresses of a demanding career - it's nice not to always be thinking about how you're going to get laid, or in the event that you do become successful, whether or not your partner is just gold digging you or something. Although a lot of that depends on who you marry and making sure you're both doing good maintenance.
We turned out okay, no major problems with any of us, decent careers, whatever. I guess we probably wouldn't have turned out much better. So yeah, I guess there wouldnt have been much in terms of better "outcome". Still, my siblings have voiced the same regret. I genuinely think he does too. The expectation of being more present than he was is one I give myself, not "expectation creep".
Not to pick on others’ life choices, but I don’t think that this particular assertion is true. Depends on your evidentiary bar, I suppose, but just from googling it:
* Mass General’s Fatherhood Project (https://thefatherhoodproject.org/schools/the-research/): “Findings from the rapidly growing science of early childhood and brain development show that a father’s active participation and emotional engagement with his children leads to improved social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes.”
* NYTimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/health/fathers-child-heal...): “Research Finds Interaction With Father, Not Mother, Affects Child Health”
* https://firstfivenebraska.org/blog/6-ways-children-benefit-f... provides a catalog of evidence and reported benefits
Beat that
Possibly true, but who knows. Especially Zuck, who does not lead a remotely ordinary life (imo).
Dad of 2 girls. 8 and 4. Maybe this should be titled “being ambitious because you’re a dad”
I am better than ever post kids. Always great, no. Always amazing, no. Not sure I agree with the post otherwise, especially quality vs quantity. High quality interactions are the best.
If you look beyond the narrow sphere of technology and founders, you'll find many of humanity's greats had kids, or more broadly, family responsibilities, at some point. Their ability and involvement as parents varies widely, but this idea that kids are some kind of an inevitable death-knell for "being successful" or renowned whatever that means, isn't true.
An alternative lens would suggest that having kids reveals a lot about life that you can use in your other pursuits.
Your kids also eventually become adults, at which point the demands likely lower significantly.
Just like the "starving artist" myth, it's mostly baloney hyperbole that people promulgate because there's some obvious basic truth to it, but it isn't a law of the universe by any means.
My working hours are 6-9 most days. Wish I had more hours in the day.
In two generations, we've gone from that to most dads constantly asking themselves "Am I a good enough dad? How could I be better?" Fathers feel that they aren't good enough if they merely provide for a good life for their family and set a good example. They try to find a way to, while of course not dropping the ball at all on the provider role, also be a 'fun dad' and a friend to their kids and be deeply involved in their lives.
I would say this is also kind of a mirror image to women's very real struggle post-1980 or so -- before, you were absolutely acknowledged to be a success if you cared well for the next generation of children and taught them to be good people. Some would say (and still do) that's one of the most important callings. Now women worry that they're not good enough unless they - without missing a beat on that first mission - also have an impactful and meaningful commercial career.
This isn't arguing to force people to perform only one sex-prescribed role or anything. And I don't want any parents to just be absent, because frankly being there for your kid is incredibly rewarding. I'm just saying, I think it's an insane amount of pressure we put on mothers AND fathers to be everything to everyone both within the family and in the professional world.
Nobody's going to give a shit that you founded an AI company and sold it to Meta for $600 million. Sure you can enjoy the material benefits while you're here. Maybe you can even pass some of that onto your children.
The Good Place was one of the best TV shows of the best shows of the last decade (IMHO) and it brought up a relatively recent (1998) book "What we owe to each other". It makes the point that it's not a question (ie "what do we owe to each other?"). You're only meaningful impact is on the people you affect around you, positively or negatively.
Personally, I have no opinion on whether people should or shouldn't have children. That's none of my business other than this: you have to make a choice between having and raising those children and chasing material "ambitions". Bringing people into the world without their consent and then neglecting them makes you an objectively terrible person. Pick a lane.
And if you do choose ambition instead, at least ask yourself why. Studies have been done on this. Money does buy happiness but only to a very limited point. Beyond that it's isolating. So why are you doing whatever it is you're ambitious about, really?
Does that count as ambition? Doesn't really matter. The basic tension described here is strong, in any case, between work and family.