alt Hacker News"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.
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I've started peering behind the curtains when I get the chance, and I've not yet found someone wildly successful who is also a model parent. Time after time, their spouse is quietly shouldering an enormous load, or their children spin their wheels and wind up rudderless, etc.
You can certainly be successful and be a good parent, but one of the first steps is recognizing and picking out the false prophets. You can't hold yourself to a superhuman standard, which is what a parent maximizing career while letting family malinger will present. They will say, Look at me, a captain of industry with vaults of gold, who has the physique of a twenty-five year old and is also an all-star parent. And you have to figure out that it's a lie.
One little clue - start to notice: of your professional idols who are good parents and seem to have it all, how many have a spouse working a demanding full time job as well? I realized for me it was zero.
"People telling you"
That's the real problem. People need to stay in their damn lane.
> The real heroes are the ones ambitiously raising the next generation while changing the world right now.
so pedagogy and psychology researchers? giving that having biological children is the worst ecological offense someone can do in an ever increasing worldwide population? [0] how about adopting and getting into voluntary programs or even do pro-social things with your money?
giving birth on the current societal status-quo not only screws with the future of our own specie but also a bunch of others which may go extinct because of our greed
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...
I would also add that, at least in my experience, those who are professionally ambitious and maximizing professional success, while being highly confident they are also succeeding at home, often have an inaccurate view of their home life. It's not until the kids are grown and openly fighting their demons that they realize the bargain that they made.
It's that old adage of, anyone who thinks they're a great parent, probably isn't. And almost all kids would be happier with a less wealthy (or even poorer) upbringing, and a tighter family.
The number of wives who have complained to me privately about the lack of family commitment of rock star husbands whom everyone admires (often precisely for their apparent family commitment) was a real eye-opener.
I'm not convinced that stratospheric success in business is very often compatible with high levels of parental and spousal involvement. It is sometimes, but those are anomalies we shouldn't build our fairy tales around. I know very few old-timers who wish they'd spent less time with their families when they could have made the difference of a lifetime.