Being ambitious and being a dad

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.

On my end, becoming a dad didn’t make me less ambitious, just more focused.

I was vp of engineering at a Series A startup when my kid was born. It was a challenging job, but one that felt increasingly devoid of any meaning for me (maybe also because I'd been there for 5 years). I was compensating by working on side-projects at night and on weekends. I even wrote a novel that took me 4 years to finish.

Then my son was born, and nights and weekends disappeared! Suddenly, all my non-father activity was dedicated to a job that was boring me more and more. So what did i do? I started a company, so I could decide what to work on during the day!. Basically, I took a side project and put it at the center of my working life. Now my days feel rewarding enough that when I disconnect, I can completely devote myself to my son and my wife and ignore everything else.

Of course, I don’t have side projects anymore. I barely even have hobbies: I completely stopped watching movies, which used to be the love of my life. I read books before bed and on the subway, and work out occasionally to stay sane. My life = my startup, my son, my wife. That’s pretty much it.

But I feel much more balanced than before, when I was always chasing something.

If we are talking about points people don't make, how about this: your life is going to get harder and worse as you get older. Your dreams will very likely die. Having kids will make that more clear, but honestly I know plenty of people with and without kids and they all struggle with the not fulfilling their ambitions (or realizing those ambitions and finding they weren't what they imagined), the fading of youth, disenchantment with their jobs, etc. Kids are all the horrible things you have heard, but it is a way to grow, it is a very concrete reason to live, at least until they move out. I very much feel the author of this post and I hope that they (and I) keep the fire that drives ambition, but grow enough to enjoy the fire itself, not care quite so much about being productive or scoring points in whatever game.

"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.

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.

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.

Hits hard. I know this is wrong, but I often find myself resentful when I see colleagues burning the midnight oil (or otherwise putting in time that I no longer have) in service of career progression.

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 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.

"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.

Just wanted to say thank you for this. In particular, the part where often it seems the "Founder mode" icons some evangelize (seem to) neglect their children and/or effectively put childrearing entirely on their partner.

I wish I had a good term (or some other concise way) to reject/criticize this aspect of tech culture.

I say founders above but I see it happen in lots of my peers who are simply workaholics. The closest saying I have (which I repeat often) is:

"The only people who will remember you worked late are your kids."

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.

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..."

So this piece really resonates with me. I have a five month old child who I really like/love - but I am filled with a passionate software idea and everytime I get a tiny bit of time to work on it, it is heaven. A while back I was able to do one hour in the morning before work on it - but have lost that hur recently. At night, I occassionally look wistfully at my computer sometimes and wish I could build - but I am just trying to be patient and I am hopefully I will soon get back 'one hour' a day in my evenings. One day...

My partner and I are considering paying for a weekend nanny to look after the boy when he turns one on Sunday- so again we have free time to work on our passion projects. Its great to be a dad but it is so time consuming with young children.

I felt very conflicted about this topic when I was young and working for Apple. I decided the Valley commute and rat race wasn’t very family conducive so I took a remote job and moved a few states over and it’s been great.

I’ve been fully remote for 12+ years now, and I’ve had a very successful career in engineering and engineering leadership. I also have eight kids that I get to spend a ton of time with. There’s a remote tax on career growth, but my RE side hustles have more than compensated for it.

Every now and then I wonder what might have been if I had stayed at Apple. No way to know for sure, but I probably couldn’t have afforded the family and lifestyle that I enjoy now.

i've always given priority to my family and kids, at the detriment of my career growth. i viewed the job as being something in service to my higher calling of being a dad, not the other way around. I have no regrets.

In fact, I was sharing with my wife the other day that now that my kids are older I am finding myself able to give more to my work in a way I didn't/couldn't before. So my perspective is that, if you abandon the retirement mindset, you can have a fruitful and abundantly productive career later on after having prioritize your family. Especially in this early years when time spent is the most important. This post is right about that.

This person is gonna burnout soon. If you have no clue why I would say this after reading this article, you might burnout soon as well..

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.

I like the OP, very honest.

Here's my 2 cents: In life, like in economy, everything's about marginal utility. If you work 5 days a week and you reduce by one, you gain 50% (free/family/hobby) time, while reducing 20% of work time. In the lost 20% work time, would you have produced the corresponding amount of output? Or are you even more productive because you avoid unnecessary meetings etc.?

It's clear that being an involved parents doesn't allow you pulling all nighters all the time or work through weekends and doing additional sideprojects. Though I agree that without full involvement and ambition one will not achieve a top position or become a tennis superstar, I think a good mixture of all aspects (family/work/sports/friendships) makes everything much more worthwhile. And in my opinion, all involved parent parts should have their fair share of those aspects.

- Parent with partner both working part time, living in a country that allows for that, equally sharing child care for two that regularly make them crazy, but it's soo worth it.

> having kids may make one less ambitious

Can't say this resonates with me. Though being a dad has wildly changed what I'm ambitious about.

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.

I once bumped into a couple of very high profile VCs sitting outside a coffee shop. Somehow the conversation got round to the fact that we were potty training our 12-month-old. One of the VCs told me their two kids, 2 and 3 years old, weren't yet out of nappies, just used pull-ups, because there hadn't been time to potty train them. There are reasons why this could have been legit (failed attempts, developmentally challenged children, etc.) but it was delivered as a kind of admonishment that I was involved in potty-training at all (even though their fund hadn't invested in my business or even been pitched).

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.

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 :-)

Like OP with my first kid, I constantly had itchy fingers -- too many ideas to ever execute on. Tired and no more flow state. Work seemed like a waste of time with politics. My hobbies were my outlet - and now it was reduced to maybe 1 hrs a day.

Then AI got good. I've always been able to solve problems fast in my head, but was bottlenecked by fingers and dumb infra.

AI gave me my time back honestly. Nix solved infra. backlog CLI kept the work clear. Good engineering, in spurts.

Now I have more execution power than ever, and I can steer my minions. Yes, I don't get to code and there is little flow state, but I always better liked to solve a problem and go to the next than actually typing it out.

From my phone, wireguard and aVNC to my homelab, I conduct ralph loops on my architecture and principles. This is so powerful, that my brain poops out even more ideas - and so I find myself fully immersed - another kind of flow state.

Consequence: Brain fry and less sleep, so sometimes I just crash out and sleep for 10 hrs. Usually get 5-6 hrs nowadays.

I believe parents should definitely aim for both.

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 ?

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.

Just wanted to say thanks for putting words to the anxiety that lurks in the back of my mind most days. Glad to know I'm not alone.

I used to be more ambitious, but I am not anymore. I enjoy my kids, I enjoy nature, camping, friends... I will the pointless work drivel to someone else and just collect the paycheck.

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.

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

Being a dad is fulfilling enough that I don’t want to do anything else but hang out with my kids. Perhaps that’s what Paul Graham meant when he said kids make you less ambitious? And I know the day will come when they won’t like to hang out with me, so I’ll have the time to go back to building things.

“Completely removing time-wasting activities”

Is a bit harsh to me. You might be ultra competitive but it could also be how you define it. But in my opinion sometimes “time wasting activities” are needed for recharging your own batteries and this kind of phrasing sounds like burnout.

Like if I said fishing someone would justify it as not being time wasting etc or meditating or something you would justify as health work but that justification is even contradictory to meditation at all.

time wasting is an odd phrase and stressful wording to me I don’t like. “wasting time” can sometimes be a productive and useful endeavor.

He forgot to talk about hobbies :)

I had a conversation about this topic yesterday with a colleague of mine. We both found some kind of career-family balance, and are continually honing it. However, we both lamented the loss of hobbies.

The so called human progress and advanced lifestyle made the simple and natural things such as having kids an adventure.

Where did the "progress" go wrong? Why did it take us backwards in the very basic goals of human life and why is it still called progress?

Thanks for sharing

Being dad is really hard joyful, you watch they grow from a tiny one to some big one which argue with you also sometimes care you when you sad

I quit from a high pay job because I want to enjoy more time with kids because I feel not get enough in my childhood

I like to read philosophy and settled with existentialism, this helps with the stress of low earning compared the previous time

Life may all about trade off, we may not lucky to get everything we want

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

* Jimmy Carter * Bill Clinton * Barak Obama

One of the biggest challenges I have as an ambitious engineer and a father of two, is that I do actually have plenty of time to be a high achiever in both facets of my life, but only if I'm working in isolation.

My kids are active in about 12-13 hour period between 6.30am and 7.30pm. The rest of the time they're asleep. On school days, window of time in which I can actually be present with them narrows right down to two blocks: 6.30-8.30, and 3.30-7.30. That's only 6 hours in a business day in which I can be active and present with them, leaving me with 18 hours to get everything else done.

There's obviously more to being a dad than just being actively engaged with your children when they're at home and awake. There's all this supplemental work that needs to happen to support them as well. But it's not _that_ much.

The problem is that this I spend with my children actively overlaps the time in which my peers and co-workers are working. Not being available to my teams for synchronous communication slows down their execution, and not having my team available to me while I'm working slows down my own execution. When my team or I need answers or collaboration to unblock us, communicating asynchronously means we can potentially be blocking for half a day or more on a task.

At that point you can either just wait and be unproductive, or start/continue a different task, maintaining multiple active work streams. The latter is problematic for a number of reasons, such as the increased cognitive load of regular context switching, an inability to work on dependent tasks, etc.

So ultimately for me, I don't think the issue is that there's not enough time to do both, it's just that both work and family generally need you at the same time.

Love the article. One question; how do you unwind? I think it's achievable to spend enough time on both your career and your children, but consequently personal time will suffer.

How do you balance that?

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.

Just have a rule that you'll leave the office at 17:00.

"Startup, parenting, hobbies, friends. I think you can do 2 of these well. But you'll have to quite light on the others."

Someone on X, don't recall who, but it resonated.

Preach!

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.

Father of three and startup founder here.

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.

This feels really weird. I feel like I’m far more productive than ever now, even with half the time spent and zero crunch. When I was younger I was flailing around doing tons of pointless shit. I could make up for that with more effort, but it doesn’t change that I can achieve the same result with far less effort now. So the output with children is more or less the same as before.

There’s also the simple fact that it’s much better for your productivity to play a round of tag than it is to attend another stupid meeting.

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.

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.

Then again don't forget being ambitious enough to be an ambitious founder, ambitious dad and an ambitious husband/wife/partner. And then being healthy enough to have energy to do all three. I keep thinking if I divide 24 hrs by 4, that would be the optimal time allocation to all 4 endeavors, but that's naive.

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.

“All the people I admire most are builders.”

If parenting and building are both truly aspirations, why not have people you admire that are great parents as well? I guess they don’t have many biographies for great moms and dads.

I admire the ambition. I wonder how many people out there are chasing both of these things, thinking they are being great parents and great builders, but are failing at one, or both.