My son was only one year’s old.
And, it was his birthday, his first birthday. I was with him on his actual birthday, but my wife had planned a small birthday party for him the upcoming weekend with the rest of the family.
“But, I can’t go, I’ve got to coach - I moved all my lessons around earlier in the week to make his actual birthday, not I’ve got to do these sessions so we can have money coming in…,”
The look of defeat on my wife’s face was brutal.
I didn’t get it.
They didn’t care about how much money I made, I did.
They didn’t care about how many lessons I did privately, I did.
They didn’t care about my business ego, I did.
There is such a tension for parents, maybe dads in particular, between being a provider emotionally and being a provider financially.
You know your kids are little and they need you. More importantly, your wife does too! But, in the back of your head, there is this inner ache telling you, like a drug…
C’mon, they’ll get it. They’ll understand that you did this to provide for them, after all.
I love Russ Roberts’s take on this when talking about his own dad. He wrote in his dad’s eulogy “He probably would have been a better writer if he spent less time with his kids.”
He goes on to say that we do this weird thing, in 2023, saying we will make up for the lack of quantity time in our relationships with our kids, friends and spouses with less higher quality time.
While the quality time rule might prove right in the personal productivity world a le 80/20 Rule (80% of your results come rom 20% of your efforts) relationships are not units of economic production. They’re messier. They take time.
Time is all we have.
If you, as a business owner make $1,000 less take home a month because you took a couple extra hours to be around your children or spouse, is that really going to get the bank to repo your house? Probably not.
At the end of your life what would you give to have one more snuggle with your toddler, walk with your wife or coffee with your grandparents?