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.

The older I get the more I realize ambition and "being ambitious" is a completely misplaced way to orient your life.

The chance of validation from others is not a good reason for making one choice or another and a life made of choices of that kind will eventually leave you spiritually bankrupt.

Make decisions based on what you're passionate about, based on what will bring and keep meaningful relationships into your life, based on what will leave you with habits that take you outside, into the sun, moving your body and eating healthy, and, sure, that will afford you the ability to pay for those things.

Focus on the process, not the outcome.

Making decisions based on what will make you more "successful" will make you a slave to others approval. And those others will use you up and waste your life to achieve their own objectives.

Also, if you pick the right partner, having kids does all the good things in life at once. It is the most efficient way to get yourself into the good life possible.

"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.

I felt successful before I had kids. Satisfying, upward-moving career; happy marriage; lots of travel; volunteering in multiple organizations. I liked all these things, succeeded in them, people liked me, etc.

As a dad, I feel like a total loser. All of the aforementioned are diminished or put entirely on hold (travel, most volunteering). I'm medicore at everything, except parenting, in which I am successful at keeping my kids alive and safe and healthy, but not in satisfying their desires. In that I am totally inadequate.

I expected that I would have to put "my" life largely on hold when we had kids and instead of the satisfaction I got from the pre-kid things, would enjoy the satisfaction of raising happy children. To have neither is demoralizing and I'm constantly looking for the critical thing that will improve the child-raising experience. And no, waiting it out for the kids to grow up is not the answer!

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.

Sorry if this offends anyone but why must we choose between having a great career and being a great parent. Why is it a zero-sum game? Want to be great at something neglect your children to do so. Want to be a great parent, fine you have a mediocre career. From the article you are ambitious about building things. Well guess what children are, the ultimate piece of clay from which you get a front row seat to mold.

If you are trying to compete with people who are kidless and constantly comparing your output to them, then yes, you are going to feel you are falling behind. But you need to stop and ask yourself, “what am I doing all this work for”? What is your goal? For me, having children changed my perspective on life. I am lucky to make enough money to live a good first world lifestyle and the rest is enjoying the moments life brings. I still have the motivation I had 20 years ago but that motivation has shifted from “building things for the wealthy” to building peace and happiness for myself and my family.

I no longer work a ton of hours, but my day is still full of conversations, walks, work-outs, bike rides ect… These things when done with family and friends bring me level of accomplishment that no product launch ever did. Also, I openly avoid the hustle-grind culture that seems to run rampant these days.

You seem to be on the correct path, just don’t fall into that trap that says you must be grinding 60+ hours a week in-order to be successful or happy. It will find you if you let it.

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.

"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..."

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.

I kinda miss the argument why so many “ambitious” people are bad parents. Maybe because it is too obvious? If you are not present for your child at the time your kid grows up (before and after school, weekends, etc) you are not a parent at all. You’re a roommate with certain privileges, but no child is interested in that.

People who work 60+ hours a week will be “worse” parents than others.

I have a positive look on this.

Most successful people I know have much higher number of children than the average. Unicorn and decacorn founders with 2-5 kids, every single one I know.

I think it's the energy and desire to live a rich fulfilling life. Building a company was part of it, but at least for me, family is ever greater fulfillment. From where I can see, all are still together with their kids parent and seem like ok parents themselves.

I also, had a successful yet still a great, supportive dad. He traveled a lot for work, was in one of the highest engineering positions available, all through my younger years. Still a great dad. He is immensely curious about us kids (and now grandkids), positive, kind. I think the curiosity part made him a great engineer but also a great parent.

I have 3 kids now and while it's true there's less time, I guess my experience has thought me not to think of it as any kind of limiting factor towards life.

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 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.

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 do not believe the quality time theory."

Over time I've come to realize that some of the most organic time—sometimes seemingly mundane, other times seemingly very unpleasant—spent with your kids can yield some incredibly high quality downstream. It isn't about being opportunistic. It's about gradually building something together. It's the same with any relationship. If you treated your spouse like this, they would leave you. If you treat your kids like this, they're mostly trapped, but given the chance one day, they will likely leave you behind to some degree or another.

Things worth building take time, effort, dedication, and perseverance. Social relations are the epitome of this. There are no short cuts. Everyone notices when you're opportunistic. Your kids most of all.

The author expresses frustration, which I totally feel too. But I often remind myself that life was never promised to be easy, nor are many things worth doing very easy (and if they are, acquiring or experiencing those things is usually the fruit of some other effort).

I've tended to enjoy being ambitious about work because it comes so easily, too. While it feels great to be productive, I'm not sure it means what it feels like it means. My productivity doesn't mean anything to others, other than my employers. Who cares? My kids don't care. My wife doesn't care. And all the while it doesn't really push me to grow in any direction other than one I already feel very comfortable with. In my experience, this is fine and healthy to engage in moderately, but going bananas with it directly subtracts from the rest of your life (such as your relationship with your kids). And there's no way that in 30 years at the end of my life I'd be glad I was good at... What, building stuff on the computer? Do I want to be alone with that thought? Not at all.

> 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.

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, I respect anyone’s choice not to be a parent. It’s constant, demanding work, far more intense than any job I’ve ever had as a baseline.

Second, this is the third time in two days I’ve seen some variation on “I dreamed of doing something significant and never wanted kids.” That’s a wild construction. Having kids is incredibly significant, and more world-changing than most of us will ever do. Having kids didn’t give my life meaning, but I’m certainly able to pour life’s meaning into my kid and family more than into anything else before it.

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.

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.

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 :-)

what the author doesn't say - is being ambitious at what ? ambitious at making useless software ? useless hardware ?

in tech we like to overwork on nonsense problems ie working on problems that change or are non permanent. literally if 98% of the software went away today it won't be missed, just like shit that came before.

if people listened to Jeff Bezos - who said - focus on things that don't change - you will realize - you can live your life - without overworking. because guess what - if you don't do something today, the problem Will exist tomorrow & the day after.

certain problems never get fully solved, just tiny bits of progress.

but I guess zero sum thinking has taken over.

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

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 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 ?

The thought of having kids brings up really complex feelings for me. I feel like the biological clock is ticking louder and louder and yet I barely have a career to speak of. I live with the constant burden of ADHD and have always struggled to hold down a job. The optimist in me thinks that maybe things will improve in the future and I should just take the plunge and figure things out. The pessimist worries that I'm already at capacity just waking up, cooking, cleaning for myself and kids would push me over the edge.

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.

Thank you fur writing this nichochar.

I have many similar thoughts, but one thing that worries me is also trying too hard to do the optimal thing. I often find that my own expectations collide with reality (kids’ moods, random events necessitating change of plans etc). So it’s important to switch from “rationally making shit happen” mode during work time to “vibe and see what happens” during family time. This mental switch is hard.

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.

It drives me crazy that everything in SF is designed to either be kid-focused or adult-focused. There's very few places where you can have a serious conversation with a collaborator while with your kids. Dogpatch Hub (right by YC) is one of the few exceptions - excellently stocked kids space, snacks, WiFi, and comfy chairs for adults to work.

I've been working on something similar at Mox (the effective altruism coworking space in the mission) as part of my (joyful parenting efforts but it won't be ready until winter when their 1st floor renovations are done.

Others who feel the same way may also be interested in this old post i wrote about how to be productive before your baby turns one on the EA forum https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xocdNsa8At3bmQKm3/...

https://joyfulparentingsf.com/

I used to think that it was hard to make the decision to have kids, but somehow now it feels harder to make the decision to not have them. I am at the age that people around me have kids ranging from new borns to young adults (and somebody is always pregnant). Having kids is totally normalized. I socialize a lot in childrens parties. Kids schedules determine what we can do with friends most of the time. I am often the babysitter and take care of other peoples children.

When I was growing up I thought everyone had kids (I guess I only socialized with families with kids). This was my future. As a young adult making the jump to having kids seemed like a big decision, but with hindsight that looks like following the default path. Now that there is growing amount of people like me with no kids I am wondering what life should look like. I lack the rolemodels.

I have witnessed my friends grow a lot in short time period when they have a kid. At first it’s a bit jarring how baby takes over their life. I think it is super cool and all of them say that it is an unique experience they can’t really explain.

By the time kid hits maybe 10 years old they have adjusted and interaction with them is pretty normal again from my perspective.

At the same time I feel I have also grown at my own pace. I don’t feel totally out of sync with my grown up parent friends although I must say I can be bit more lighthearted and experimental with my life. The stakes are low. It is not like I think life is about career or hedonistic pursuits anymore. I don’t want to live the life of a 30 year old. I value being part of society, socially present and giving. Enjoying simple things and seeing beauty in the world.

In a way my life looks like that of an empty nester, but without the prospect of seeing my child building a life for themselves, having grand children etc. Feels like a big decision I have done for my future self.

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.

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.

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’m a dad who has struggled with this too. I’ve also had the privilege of getting to know a relatively large number of highly successful people.

One thing I’ve noticed is that, yes, to make it into the history books you likely have to pursue your career at the cost of everything else (and be insanely lucky).

But right below that degree of one in a billion success is a much larger group of very successful people who manage to achieve admirable balance in their lives. Their spouses love them, their kids want to spend time with them, and rhey might even have a hobby or two.

The thing is, these people tend to be quieter - a few I know are downright secretive. They aren’t constantly online or in the press seeking validation because they have achieved fulfillment at home and work.

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.

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.

Personal ambition is often a poor signal for living your life because it tends to have an arbitrary and empty goal, being successful or powerful or wealthy just for the sake of it. It will be a struggle and never feel like enough, each milestone is as arbitrary as the last.

The people I have known who were the most grounded, happiest, productive, and fulfilled all understood their lives on some level to be in service of something that has value to more than just themselves. That can be being a mom or dad, furthering the knowledge of humanity, serving your community, it can be anything that you recognize as greater than yourself.

It brings you into contact with other people who share the same goal. It is a stronger fuel than personal ambition, and one that doesn't leave you empty along the way.

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 know many ambitious parents; it’s not an uncommon combination

That is a weird statement. Most people eventually have kids, so obviously the average ambitious person has kids.

My experience is actually that there is a bias towards more ambition among the childless. Not because of laziness of parents, mind you. But in the decision whether to have kids or not, ambition may play the decisive role, everything else being equal. It goes so far that I have heard otherwise reasonable people resent childless colleagues because of course those workaholics can afford to push overtime while those with kids are pushed into carreer disadvantages, so they say.

I started off and a shy, awkward (probably autistic) computer programmer wondering if I could ever convince a woman to marry me. Now I'm on my 3rd kid and hoping for more.

Parenting gives to access to a part of the world you never knew existed. The school events, sports, Cub Scouts, neighbors down the street. You meet people who are trying to create a great world for their children. Your interests align, so you end of working together on it. You actually become part of the community.

I used to be Mr. Career, and maybe someday I'll get back to it. But right now my job plays such a small role in my life compared to my family.

When I was in high school, my dad was an executive at a large international Fortune 500 finance firm.

His main job was to fly around the world and train salespeople on how better attract and retain clients.

One year, he was traveling for 180 days aka half of the entire year.

For many years I was somewhat conflicted about this b/c on the one hand he wasn't around much but on the other hand my mom didn't have to work, we had a great life and got to take international vacations every year.

As a father now, I appreciate the sacrifice my dad made to not see us as much but to provide a great life for his wife and kids.

“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.

This article reminds me of a time when I was pushing my kid on a swing in the backyard after work. It was all I was doing. No background processes running mentally. With all the obligations and people waiting on me at work and deliverables due yesterday, I had managed to turn it off. It occurred to me that simply pushing my kid on a swing and thinking of nothing else was probably the most important thing I could ever do in that single moment. That was a freeing change of perspective for me.

Right now you have a window. AI can do a huge chunk of the work you were doing last year, and outside of programming, nobody seems to know about it yet. I've cut 10 hours a week out of my schedule in the last several months just in time to have my first kid, at the ripe old age of 46.

They'll figure it out and we will be right back to the same pressure we had before, but for a short time at least, if your field is competitive, you have a huge edge.

"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.

For me (father of 5 adult children, +2) being an older man and an experienced father (and grandfather as well) my parental responsibilities have largely changed what being ambitious means. As a man in my late 30s to 40s, I was ambitious in a fairly conventional sense, although my focus was a little unconventionally centered. Over the last decade or so, my focus has drifted to ways I can prepare my family for, or influence outcomes of the course of events. Some of those things are intersectional with creating value and benefiting from that process, but that part has become a lot less important to me even if it isn’t any less urgent.

At my age, you start to understand the trajectory aspect of life and how changing circumstances put the lie to the illusion of stability and permanence. You start to glimpse things in the context of centuries, with decades as fundamental units rather than years, or months. Even things that happened before you were born begin to seem recent, and things evolving half a decade or more in the future are fairly clear and immediately relevant.

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

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.

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.

I was thinking lately how lucky I am to have gotten good guidance from my parents and grandparents that oriented me well to life and work. I think this is / used to be more commonly understood or maybe just seems that way.

Ambition and drive are important but there's an important "so what" there as well. Am I aimlessly ambitious or am I ambitious for the sake of being able to support my family and make a significant impact on the world? If you are lucky enough to have the second orientation then I think there's less conflict between these things.

I have plenty to tech and finance friends who are successful and in our mid 40s, and unfortunately for those who neglected to have the family side of the equation, the shine is wearing off. What's the point of making the next level promotion and making the next 200k pay bump when what you do with it is come back to your apartment by yourself? Sure it's more comfortable and could still be fun to be ambitious and successful but it's lacking the goal piece.

The other half of my friends have family and then the financial etc success feeds directly into it. Can you give your family a good home, a good education, good experiences? It's easier for me to call a "success" a friend with a 4 bedroom house with 3 kids on it, than one with a Manhattan penthouse with no kids in it, even if the homes cost the same. It's just a different dimension.

The other thing is - making the world a better place for the future. The kids you raise and the work you achieve both feed into that. And also the future you are building is something that will benefit your kids - so all the things are aligned.

Then it becomes a "simple" balance - what's the thing that maximizes what I actually want to achieve. I want to be a good father and that takes both being with the kids, and working to make money - and also to set a good example for them of what work looks like. So yes in a simple sense you become less productive because you are going to work fewer hours, but I don't feel less productive in the grand total of life because all the things I am doing across work and family add up to what I want to accomplish.

I am curiosit - I bet many people will read this and think "of course, I feel the same way and what other way to feel is there" and others will say "I disagree at the root" which goes back to this being something with how your family raised you and the perspective you have from it.

I very much agree with this blog post but would reframe it a bit. I think ambition, like most things in life, is zero-sum and requires trade-offs. Before kids, all of your ambition could go into your professional life, but what happens when you become a parent and have parental ambitions?

To have a life that will feel successful to you, you need to have your ambitions aligned with what really matters to you. Whether that is being a great parent, having great community, building a great company, creating amazing works of art, etc.

There isn't necessarily one "right" balance, but there are certainly many examples of people who went all in on one thing (Einstein, Steve Jobs, etc) to the detriment of anything else, even though they brought children into this world. It doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong, but they were probably crap fathers to have.

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.

From my perspective this article ignores a key part of being a parent - your partner! Me and my wife build and sold a business - while having a our first child. If you have a partner which supports you/or you support your partner - you can find the time for your kids. Paid help can give you time back without taking time from your kids: get a chef (can also just hire for meal-prep), cleaners, all sorts of helpers (even try to get along with your own parents). If you are successful you can spend money to get time with your kids/family AND put time into work. We also started building an AI agent (of course) hermo.ai which can help manage and reduce your admin work and giving you more time for whatever you want - for example playing with your kids.

> 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.

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.

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.

The problem with that article is, it defines greatness with people who are popular on the Internet or have had a popular success.

For great parents, if you can think on your own, don't look further than your own parents. Did they something right.

I think having kids has made me more ambitious than I was before, certainly recently. One has some extra needs, that have come to light over the last few years, so I've spent most evenings and the odd weekend over the last 2 years trying to build something that I'm hoping will help with that.

Always had ideas to build things before, and they kinda fizzled out, but recent developments have made me realise that I have to be ambitious right now, that doesn't mean taking time away from them, just time away from me.

So in a weird way, they have encouraged me to be ambitious by just being themselves.

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.

Be ambitious to be happy.

The trick is not making it about being very productive, but productive "enough".

Elon and many others act like if not everyone is giving it their 110%, the world will be doomed, however the world is full of communities that otherwise were living happily getting destroyed by 110ers.

If you accept your (and everyone elses) insignificance, focus on your community, and just try to be compatible with your kids or colleagues or random people on the street , while at the same keeping your ability to reject judgement, life gets much easier.

My career didn't really take off until I got kids in my 30s. And my wife's took off even harder; she's now director at a Dutch government organisation. I went from fairly average developer when they were born, to self-employed freelancer with increasingly cool, complex projects on my CV, to now starting my own business.

Sure, not Steve Jobs level, but pretty good. We both worked 4 days a week most of that time (I a bit more consistently than my wife), and took plenty of time off to do stuff with the kids.

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.

I have a relatively good stable job, working in tech. When I came across generative AI and how it could be used to solve difficult math problems and materialize amazing codebases, the feeling of awe makes me want to understand the magic. I am contemplating choosing between changing my career and being in my stable job, raising my kids. Of course, I am probably unqualified for frontier labs, where I want to work on models. Ambition seems to have gotten a hold off me and won't let me go.

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.

Noted that aside from Einstein most of the others were just engaged in shallow FOMO business building; cars, computers, business as usual.

Numerous other options to solve those problems existed.

The return on their mechanical investment and abandonment of their kids, from a STEM context, was meaningless; it's all been superseded by better modern solutions. They were engaged in meager iterative improvement and social moat building.

Einstein is the only one whose contribution will be discussed in another century.

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.

Maybe I just suck at accounting or productivity

but having a child actually rejuvenates me to do more. yes I probably staring at the screen less number of hours per day, becuase I have children. But I wouldn't say I was doing 10X as much as when I was a bachelor. there is only so much effective work you can get done in a day before you're out of ideas and need sleep or break. playing for 2 hours with my kid gets me fresh and kicking no matter how badly my day sucked.

Strauss Zelnick the TakeTwo CEO has talked about how there’s two periods to go hard at your career ambitions: before kids and then after they are older and have their own lives. In between, my frame on this personally has always been that no matter how much money I make in the future, one day I would spend all of it to have another day with my kids at the age they are right now. And so for a period, that’s the focus. It won’t be forever but it is right now.

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 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.

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.

To achieve maximum career success & maximum effort to be a great dad is not possible.

Time, energy, & your age are finite. That’s all there is to it.

However, if the metric of career/financial success is reduced to just net worth gaining at X% rate consistently, then it is possible to spend as little time as possible on career success and maximum time to be the best dad possible.

I retired after realizing and choosing this path.

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..

“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 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 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 am writing this because I never hear anyone say it.

Actually I am hearing ambitious Moms saying it. From a different baseline though.

Personally, I decided that being ambitious at work wasn't as important to me relative to being involved in my kids' lives, and intentionally pulled back. I'm fortunate that my work offers part time options, so I went down to 80%. I take two half days per week to spend the afternoon with my kids after school.

I dont have kids and this post is really making me think about the future, wether i want kids or not, reading the comments i see people that say "i wish i had started having kids earlier"... Is it really that impactfull? Are parents really linked that hard towards their childrens? Im sincerely very courious about this...

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 guy equates ”ambition” with ”career ambition”. Getting children means splitting your ambition between work and family. And family always comes first. There are no excuses for anyone, no matter how ”ambitious” or entrepreneurial, to work a 50 hour week if you have young kids at home.

"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 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.

Hey Nicolas! its Jake from Cruise. pretty wild to see your post blow up on HN. hope all is well!

My solution is to involve my kids in all my projects. I am very lucky that I build games and often they are educational games where my kids are literally the target audience. No better education for the kids and you get a very natural organic quality time.

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.

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.

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..

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

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?

“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'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.

I'am also dad of a seven month kid and in my case it increase dramatically my ambition.

I'm working harder again even if i have less time, because i want to build a legacy for him and want to show and make make him an exceptional life.

It can make you stronger.

I like the sentiment from Hitchens that we choose our regrets. Being an absent father was not something I was willing to regret. I know it has cost me some degree of earning potential and career progression. I wouldn't change anything.

Just have a simple rule. The period from 4pm to 8pm in the week days are holy. No work - no phone. Kids are the top priority.

If you can stick to this you are most likely spending more time with your kids than a normal non-ambitious parent anyways.

…or just don’t have kids. Reproducing is the ultimate in self-centeredness. It’s entirely optional.

Replace having kids in this article with rebuilding a vintage engine from scratch in your garage to see how ridiculous this attitude is.

Do one thing and do it well.

Dropping this all-timer: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html

> 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?

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.

I love reading content like this. It makes me feel sane in very insane times.

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.

Kids cured my nihilism. Since my first was born I feel more focused and find it easier to prioritize what's important. Could have never had this without the appropriate partner though.

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?

Love this thinking and wish we'd see more content like this on HN.

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.

Building things into your middle and late middle age is a waste of your talents. You're not as good at building things as you were in your youth. Einstein's output drastically went down after say 1919 or so.

That doesn't mean you don't have something to offer, you do. You're better off teaching and guiding others to carry on the work as you get older. They'll appreciate you for it rather than you selfishly doing it all yourself. Raise your children as if they are your most important project because they are. The work will carry on without you.

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!

As an ambitious engineer with a 10-month-old baby, this perfectly captures my situation and how I’ve been feeling. Thank you for writing it.

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 am not less ambitious. But I am also ambitious about being a great dad." Or Mom. This is a powerful mindset right here. It's also hard to judge someone's ambition from the outside because there is still so much inequality of opportunity. The OP mentioned limitations of Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk as parents. The story of Paul Ehrenfest is an even more depressingly stark contrast between personal and professional success.

On the other hand, there is a lot of moral ambiguity when it comes to judging someone else's parenting - and lack of ambition clearly does not make one a better parent. The history of women in science and mathematics and literature illustrates the tradeoffs among talent and opportunity and ambition that have persisted for centuries and continue to this day. Two of my favorite examples are that of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who was supported in her studies because her father considered her lacking in beauty and Emmy Noether (referred to as essentially the most intelligent woman of all time by Einstein), who demonstrated no prodigious talent in her early education but due to persistent and opportunities shaped in part by having a father who was an Algebraist, is remembered as an intellectual giant.

Thank you for writing this! I've been thinking about this a lot after becoming a dad (3yo + a 2nd baby in about one week or so).

Ambition may or may not be the right word to use, as others have commented. One thing I have reflected on is not if I should be making a compromise with one or the other, but why in our modern society the easiest path is to only pick one. The more I read about how to bring up healthy strong children, the more I think we've just gone backwards as a species.

There is a lot of research about the bad effects of screens and constant dopamine on long-term mental health and resilience (read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Heidt). In reality, until just maybe 50 years ago, it was socially accepted for parents to be raising children with a support network around them. That had both good and bad sides - fewer rights for moms/women, dads less involved in parenting. But instead of fixing that, we threw out the whole idea that you need a village to support you as a parent and replaced it with career maxxing as the only prominent virtue to speak about.

I have believed in individual freedom and liberalism forever, but these days I think there is such a thing as too much individualism and we've taken that to an extreme. This makes it really hard to want or be able to raise children, and our society's long-term health suffers as a result, despite all of our scientific progress. Individual parents shouldn't be forced to have the internal debate that the author is having and pick between them - we should fix our social systems and institutions to not need that choice. But that's an even harder problem.

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.

Have discipline, and you'll have all the time you need.

Easier said than done, I mean, what I am doing here?

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

* Jimmy Carter * Bill Clinton * Barak Obama

"work is love made visible" - Kahlil Gibran. Part of a poem you could read.

The greatest gift the childless have is not knowing how amazing having children is.

4 kids, 4 companies, let’s go!

Claude Code fits my lifestyle.

Just believe! And accept constant stress as a good thing.

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 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.

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.

Being a great dad is also enough. Raising good kids is a huge benefit to society.

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?

One of my fears is that I can't live up to how my kids look up to me.

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

> As long as there is the desire to gain, to achieve, to become, at whatever level, there is inevitably anxiety, sorrow, fear. The ambition to be rich, to be this or that, drops away only when we see the rottenness, the corruptive nature of ambition itself. The moment we see that the desire for power in any form — for the power of a prime minister, of a judge, of a priest, of a guru — is fundamentally evil, we no longer have the desire to be powerful. But we don't see that ambition is corrupting, that the desire for power is evil; on the contrary, we say that we shall use power for good — which is all nonsense. A wrong means can never be used towards a right end. If the means is evil, the end will also be evil. Good is not the opposite of evil; it comes into being only when that which is evil has utterly ceased. > > So, if we don't understand the whole significance of desire, with its results, its by-products, merely to try to get rid of desire has no meaning.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti, Think on These Things

Being a dad has brought more focus into my life as an entrepreneur.

Articulates my thoughts and conundrums better than I could have.

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

Being a dad has made me a more focused entrepreneur.

This is an excellent post. I definitely limited my career growth by choosing roles that allowed me to spend more time with my daughters. I did not accomplish the things I wanted to career wise—but a wise person once said “The world does not need more successful people.”

You will likely feel at times like you missed out on career opportunities, and as an ambitious person that will always nag at you. But I believe ambition is a bit of a selfish drive to achieve instead of to serve.

I guess I am just trying to say—you will regret it at times. But you will end up having achieved something for them and yourself that is far more important than anything you could have built in your career. I hope you will look back on your post one day and realize what a great choice you made!

Maybe you should read about women's career choices because for them it might be even more challenging to make trade-off btw career and family. Your inspiring figures seems to be mainly men and I don't have a lot of examples of women in tech (I'm not just well informed enough) but in other fields such as politics it might be very inspiring to have their advices. It would be also very meaningful to have a small glimpse at how you and your wife chose to balance careers and life because maybe the balance btw family and work is more at couple level rather than one of the two of you. thanks for sharing your thought here, wishng you good luck for your kids, your wife and you mate ;)

I would be open to having kids if society were better. But as it is reproducing is too risky. Cost of living is already super expensive, no community support, friends' kids are mediocre at best and often disabled. Divorces are more financially devastating. Plus the whole fascism in the USA thing and staring at a screen their whole lives as the environment gets destroyed. Plus my girlfriend doesn't want them and I'm old. Maybe on another planet. Hence the idiocracy.

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

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.

Great parents are invisible.

There is no exact framework on how to do it successfully for sure - a pretty interesting challenge worth trying and succeeding at for me. A kid teaches you to be present and grateful and not spend time on bullshit. But the most important thing to do is to have the right spouse for you; this is instrumental for happiness and success:)

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 :-)

I worked with some ambitious motherfucker who fancied himself so important and so busy his secretary scheduled when he would take a piss.

He told me once that his work was his passion and his legacy. No kids, no wife. And he was brilliant and hard working. But he was running from something in his mind. There was a shakeup at the top and he got pushed out in the ensuing politics.

His legacy is a cautionary tale. But I don’t remember his last name.

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.

Edit: I have realized my original comment/rant might have come off as a negative sentiment towards the post author. While generally, I sympathize with the author and agree with the original post. My rant has been focused exclusively on the current market trends and double-speak of AI productivity gains, layoffs and increased workload.

A lot of juggling with words here: being ambitious, a builder, competing etc. It really boils down to the same thing: making more money + fame. The author should really stick to that and stop hiding behind big words. There's nothing noble about the recent slop-producing startups that YC funds. They do not make the world a better place.

In the article, then named figures in technology (Paul Graham, DHH, Jeff Dean, even Mark Zuckerberg) who are classified as great fathers and great achievers all succeeded before having kids. Who succeeded after having kids and was at the same time great father?

In case the author of this reads this - on your death bed you will look back at this time and regret not spending _more_ time with your kids.

Being ambitious on both fronts means you are running at 200%.

Life will normalise that for you whether you like it or not.

They will be gone soon. Stop optimizing for both. It's dada time.

It should be a lot more shameful to pretend that having kids is a normal or healthy activity.

It’s selfish, unnecessary, consumes immense amounts of resources, increases unfair social policies against those who are intelligent enough to avoid it, and almost universally induces a delusion in the parents that they have done something meaningful, helpful, world-changing, or profound, without affecting their ability to notice the plainly obvious fact that humans have evolved this delusion to keep them bonded to the incredible amount of time and inconvenience caused by children so that the species will continue.

Pro-natalists will of course dismiss this view as abnormal, simply because they themselves have succumbed to this delusion. There is no objective benefit to society or others caused by reproduction, and the harms are well-documented (increased resource consumption, crowding, increased need for resource redistribution, etc).

Kids are nothing but a burden to anyone other than their parents, yet society is so biased toward children that everyone in society is forced to accommodate and pay for the poor choices of parents. Parents are encouraged nonstop to have children they cannot afford to fully care and provide for.

It is a nonstop tragedy from all angles.

Children are a luxury option, like buying a Porsche or taking regular vacations to the Greek isles. You probably can’t afford to do it well, it burdens everyone around you for your own pleasure, and after you’re done you haven’t meaningfully improved the world for anyone.

Most people have children by accident, or out of motivations formed exclusively from fear, selfishness, narcissism, or greed. Societal traditions allow and encourage them to paper over these motivations with noble illusions.

Do not in any way confuse the good that human beings have accomplished with the need to produce more of them.

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.

So, a time-constrained ambitious dad spends his time on HN and reads extensive biographies.

Good luck :)

This hits home

Amen brother.

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.

While I do not know anything about DHH's parenting, rarely have I heard of a racist shithead being a good dad, so I'll keep my reservations, thanks

Great post Nicholas.

I’d look outside Silicon Valley for examples of how to do this well.

Outside of the big coastal cities, raising kids and building a career aren’t treated as competing ambitions. They’re just what people do.

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.

Nailed it.

Kind of a silly, borderline delusional premise. Be a "great" dad while also working a full time job? What a huge constraint to operate within.

yeah can we talk about how icky elon musk paying women to artificially inseminate them is? and ONLY selecting male embryos?

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.

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?

If you can’t have a career and a family you may be in a death cult.

Jesus. I couldn't imagine being a YC startup bro with kids.

>"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...

> 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 am glad to see this:

"I do not believe the quality time theory. I firmly believe in maximizing the quantity of time spent with them."

Because I think that among highly motivated workers there's a falsely held belief that you can make up for missed time with your children by planning "exclusive time" with them, either over a nice vacation, or special night in a month, or whatever. And, don't get me wrong, any time is better than no time. But I think that strong relationships might be made best in the down moments, the "bored" time, the random stuff, the drives to school, picking up the house, mealtimes, random crap, that those are the times that you discover the little nuances of your children's personality (and your own personality).

Before kids, I frequently defined myself by my work or my hobbies. Meet someone new and you're chatting with them, and I'd say "Oh, yeah, I'm a software engineer, yeah, I like to fish, I play basketball, I love watching football and drinking beer, I'm from [X] city, I want to this college and studied this subject." And that's how I defined myself. It's pretty normal, I think. Since having kids so much of my identity has changed and how I identify myself has changed. That "I Think You Should Leave" sketch from Season 2 or 3 resonated with me, the "DONT TALK ABOUT YOUR KIDS" sketch because it's so hard not to, especially with other people who have kids, it's like ... what else can I talk about? The hobbies I had before kids seem utterly pointless and valueless in retrospect.

After our second, my wife got sick, she was diagnosed with ALS when he was just over a year old, though she had undiagnosed symptoms going back to before she was pregnant with him. She physically can't care for him, and so I've been my son's sole caretaker, and my daughter's primary/default caretaker though she's 8 years old, so my wife is able to contribute more evenly with parenting for her. As he gets older, depending on the progression of the disease, that can increase with my son as well, but for a newborn, infant, baby, and toddler, there's just so much physical care for those ages that it's hard for someone with a neurological, degenerative disease to contribute in the same way.

Kids truly changed everything with me. Every single way that I define myself. I don't define myself by my work at all anymore, and I sometimes define myself by my hobbies, but I feel entirely defined by my kids. If I was answering some general inquiry about myself, and if I was allowed to be frank, I'd lead with my kids, it's how I see myself.

When I saw the Bob Odenkirk line from Mike Birbiglia's podcast/interview, I legitimately cried, because it hit me right in the throes of parenting hell. I have a wife who I'm taking care of, I had a ~7ish year old who I was trying my best to help through adolesence, and I had a 1.5 year old who I was completely and wholly responsible for keeping alive, keeping healthy, and keeping happy. And this quote just hit me like a ton of bricks.

Birbiglia: "Who are you jealous of?"

Odenkirk: "Anybody who has little kids at home, growing up. ... Yeah, there's no question I knew what I was doing when I had kids growing up, I was being a dad. I mean, that was my job, and I didn't have to ask myself, 'What am I doing here? How can I be a part of this world? How can I be meaningful today?' I didn't have to ask that question, because the fucking answer is 'Pick up everything between here and the door, and make sure they get to school, and have a laugh with them.'

I understood my purpose."

And god, that fucking resonates with me so, so hard. It still makes me cry when I hear that or see the clips of it, because I realized that when I was answering that question every other time trying to describe myself, and when I answered with what I do, and what I studied, and where I'm from, or what my hobbies are, those were all bull shit. And now when I think of who I am, I know who I am, I am dad.

I am a bad software engineer. I'm a mediocre project lead. I think I'm a good colleague. But I know that I'm a great dad.

Focus on your kids, your health, and your work? It seems like a very tall order.

You've studied many notable builders, but have you studied the great dads? How much time does one have to spend to be a great dad? Do they get to pick the times when they can spend their focus on being dad, or do they have to be present at times they'd rather be doing other things? I think being a great dad might involve a lot of taking your children to sports practice, music lessons, play dates, libraries, and tons of other activities until you discover what clicks with them, and then there's many years of supporting those interests. I don't think you can just put it on pause during the week. To be a great and present dad, I think you can only count on being able to spend maybe 55 to 60 hours a week on work (with a lot of that being after bedtime and/or starting very early).

Looking at the great builders, I think the common element is that they picked the right thing to work on at the right time, in the right place, executed better than their peers, and also had a ton of luck.

* Zuckerberg was in the right place at the right time with ample luck and he chose to drop out of Harvard to spend a few years doing the hardcore startup house thing working exclusively on building Facebook, and nine years later he had his first kid. Right place, right time, strong execution, and much luck.

* Bill Gates was in the right place (a high school where he got extensive access to a mainframe computer, then in a local company that gave him and his friends unlimited computing time in exchange for them finding and fixing bugs) at the right time (when mainframe computers were an extremely rare and expensive thing and before operating systems existed) and he dropped out of Harvard to go all in on building Microsoft, then 21 years later he had his first kid. Right place, right time, right skills, great execution, and much luck.

* Paul Graham was in the right place (a Harvard CS Ph.D. who studied design at RISD living in NYC) at the right time (during the Internet 1.0 boom and before both the bust and before anyone else had brought a site building cloud application SAAS offering to the market), and he brought a great idea to market in time to sell it to Yahoo in 1998 for $49M of stock and he correctly elected to cash out his stock before the bubble burst in March 2000. And then he leveraged his great technical and business faculties to identify and develop great business ideas via YCombinator (2005-present). Then he had his first kid in 2009). Right place, right time, right skills, great execution of a novel great idea, and much luck.

* John Carmack is probably the platonic ideal of focusing and getting things done. His work ethic and habits are legendary (8 hours of sleep a night, 10 hours of focused work a day, and 60 hours of work a week) as is his output (Doom, Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake). In 1978 he discovered video games and in 1982 (at age 12), his family bought an Apple II computer and he quickly learned BASIC to start making games before digging deeper to learn assembly code. He gained deep and extensive knowledge of how computers work, motivated by his drive to make games, and this enabled him to make the limited PC hardware of the time do things comparable to purpose-built arcade machines. He came up at the right time, had sufficient interest, drive, and vision that motivated him to deeply explore and master computing as well as design and develop many iconic games of the 1990s. Then in 2004 he had his first kid, at which point he started working less, although still a 50+ hour per week workload. Luckily his children are interested in programming, which makes it easier for him to get quality time in. Still, right time, great skills, great ideas, much luck.

* etc.

Having a child already, you might be a bit constrained. But if you can manage getting into the right place to seize upon a great and novel idea that you are uniquely positioned to execute on, you might be able to build the idea out while the market and need is unserved.

Another potential strategy is to work on an established business model that someone else came up with, and spend your evenings and weekends with your children. The best dad I knew growing up did this (he was/is a database administrator and was the dad of three of my friends I knew through my boy scout troop who have all grown up to do incredible things and also be deeply happy people) and is still one of the coolest, most interesting and well-rounded people I've ever met.

Some of those names were amusing to see. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Really?

Some of the names there were amusing. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Really?