alt Hacker NewsBeing ambitious and being a dad
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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.
The capitalist LinkedIn-dwellers are obsessed with productivity. They can claim that AI will raise productivity and that we will need to work even more at the same time. Ultimately, most of the productivity gains in the recent decades are focused on displaying more ads, in one way or another.
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.
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.
"I firmly believe in maximizing the quantity of time spent with them; there are no diminishing returns for them on that front."
This is something that should be self evident to any parent, no need to write or read a piece to establish that truism.
Time to close the laptop and spend time with the kids...
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.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes ambition is just to put food on the table. That’s all it’s ever got me and the rest is the dream to escape a life of work work work.
Be a parent, ffs. And be it, 100%. Be it 500%.
Having kids is easily and by a huge distance the very best thing you can “build”. It’s the best project you’ll ever make.
If you can find a way to run a cool thing on the side then great. I’ve been lucky, or something, and I have. And I love it.
But my kids are a trillion times more important. And now they’re 21 and 19 I can live knowing that I’ve launched the best couple of projects in the world.
The IPO in my parental project arrived and stocks are doing well :-)
It is not just the time. Having kids (dependents) consciously or subconsciously lowers your risk threshold. Makes you less flexible in a lot of aspects. All these little things will lead to tempering your ambitions or take on additional stress to keep it up..
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.
So, a time-constrained ambitious dad spends his time on HN and reads extensive biographies.
Good luck :)
“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?
The trade offs are real, but a suppressed desire to have kids can lead to dissatisfaction and with time that will be hard to ignore or fix.
Also, let's just not ignore that Musk is wildly successful in having shown you an example that you don't have to choose one thing
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.
Being a great dad is also enough. Raising good kids is a huge benefit to society.
I like it. Great points made.
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.
> 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?
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.
Love this thinking and wish we'd see more content like this on HN.
Have discipline, and you'll have all the time you need.
Easier said than done, I mean, what I am doing here?
If your ambition is to have lots of free time and not too much responsibility...that's also difficult to balance with having kids.
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.
The modern (mostly western?) obsession with "parenting" as a job/hobby is truly despicable. Probably as despicable as the standard education factory farming most of these parents are subjecting their children to. It is a miracle that despite all this parenting and education, some children manage to grow into fully formed individuals.
I love my parents. They are not perfect, but as much as they could afford, they never stood in my way. I love my children and I will strive to provide for them the resources, space, and freedom to grow and become who they are as individuals with infinite potential. I will never treat them as extensions of myself.
I'm writing this for the log, so I can remember my ideals. I'm sure everyone here has disagreements, opinions and wisdom that they wish to impart, but I frankly don't care. A culture that condones keeping dysgenic inbred mutilated wolves in one's house to satisfy the pleasure of "caring" for an animal weaker than oneself has no lessons to teach me about raising children. Whatever lessons I could distill from it for myself, I have already done so.
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 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.
I grew up in a huge family with a dad who wasn't particularly successful but spent all his time working anyway, with little attention to either the household or to building relationships with his kids.
I think this was mostly a matter of temperament; he liked to work and he didn't really care much about the operation he was funding, which is unfortunately why he has no contact with most of his adult children today.
All that to say, I didn't mind that he worked a lot, but it was pretty damaging that he almost never spoke to me other than for urgent logistical or disciplinary reasons. Just, you know, don't do that.
family life is not about "compounding gains" -- in part because family life is not about "gain" at all. On the contrary - you sacrifice and are ultimately consumed! The language of investing is entirely out of place in this context.
You touch on the right point when you say “completely removing time-wasting activities.” Looking at a handful of biographies and trying to extract universal lessons from them is somewhat misguided/infantile.
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.
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.
Beat that
>"This sucks. I am ambitious: I wake up every morning with a burning fire in my stomach to build awesome things."
And then his company is an AI slop no-code website generator...
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
Articulates my thoughts and conundrums better than I could have.
> Steve Jobs literally abandoned his daughter Lisa because “the time wasn’t right” (he was focused on Apple).
Steve Jobs is also a criminal. See the court cases where he underpaid developers and conspired with other companies to avoid hiring people away. That is criminal.
See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/23/steve-job... and many similar reports. It is time to stop idolizing this guy. The "time was not right" is not surprising by someone who steals money from developers, which Steve did here. Apple owes people money.
My career plateaued as soon as I had kids. I don't regret it, but companies definitely don't promote people with kids as rapidly, almost as if they know they have extra bargaining power over them because they have dependents to worry about.
I have had to very deliberately and repeatedly let myself off the hook for ambitions while parenting. There is SO MUCH that I am hungry to do, and none of it is as important as being fully present with my kids.
Will there come a time when these are more complimentary than in conflict? Maybe! But while the kids are young, not often. And while I feel the conflict, it’s helpful to have somewhat pre-decided what I’d regret more, and it would be not having connected with them.
If there’s time later to do great things, especially with them, so much the better.
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.
Being a dad has brought more focus into my life as an entrepreneur.
Great parents are invisible.
One thing I hate about SV culture is the bullshit. Are we talking about making lots and lots of money? If so, please for the love of god just say so.
Fame? Status?
Being a dad has made me a more focused entrepreneur.
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.
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.
One of my fears is that I can't live up to how my kids look up to me.
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.