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.
"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.
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.
> 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 children 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 species but also a bunch of others which may go extinct because of our greed
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..."
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 think this is the point though right? The author is saying that he rejects this dichotomy and he's attempting to take on both even if others might perceive it as impossible.
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.
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.
'Ambitious' often means doing optional things that take time.
A single person who cuts back on time spent doom scrolling / tv watching / beer drinking to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices is ambitious.
A new parent who cuts back on time with their kids to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices needs their head checked.
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, I'm a father of three young kids and have found there's a similar complementarity in some ways but not others. There's a huge physical component to parenting, and this is perfectly complementary. There's also an emotional aspect (sometimes 2 or even 3 cry at once). This can be complementary or not depending on how much emotional labor work required (usually very little).
The one area where both work and kids is exhausting is attention. A toddler demands a huge amount of attention, and performing at work does too.
This 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Ultimately any two ambitions will compete with each other for finite time and energy. (Assuming each ambition benefits from more time and energy being spent on it, which is usually the case.)
You can be reasonably successful in multiple areas, but you can't max them all, you have to compromise somehow.
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.
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.
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.
> without much concrete evidence that it hurts long-term outcomes, assuming the child is otherwise healthy and well taken care of.
Not to pick on others’ life choices, but I don’t think that this particular assertion is true. Depends on your evidentiary bar, I suppose, but just from googling it:
* Mass General’s Fatherhood Project (https://thefatherhoodproject.org/schools/the-research/): “Findings from the rapidly growing science of early childhood and brain development show that a father’s active participation and emotional engagement with his children leads to improved social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes.”
I think the difference between your opinion and others is that for many being a dad is the intention and not an expectation. They want the experience of being an active and present parent. If it were purely about obligation, in this day and age they probably just wouldn't have children.
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.
Earnestly: LLM hosting companies allow easy exchange of money for relatively nuanced language processing. Great power for filtering text anywhere you have the need.
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 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.
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.
Being self-aware and self-critical is one of those changes that instantly improves everyone's life around us, including our own.
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 children 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 species 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/...
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..."
I love my kids but they take a lot of time. Wouldn't change it for the world though.
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.
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.
Can't say this resonates with me. Though being a dad has wildly changed what I'm ambitious about.
A single person who cuts back on time spent doom scrolling / tv watching / beer drinking to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices is ambitious.
A new parent who cuts back on time with their kids to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices needs their head checked.
Now, I'm a father of three young kids and have 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.
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.
Someone on X, don't recall who, but it resonated.
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 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.
You can be reasonably successful in multiple areas, but you can't max them all, you have to compromise somehow.
Beat that
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.
Not to pick on others’ life choices, but I don’t think that this particular assertion is true. Depends on your evidentiary bar, I suppose, but just from googling it:
* Mass General’s Fatherhood Project (https://thefatherhoodproject.org/schools/the-research/): “Findings from the rapidly growing science of early childhood and brain development show that a father’s active participation and emotional engagement with his children leads to improved social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes.”
* NYTimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/health/fathers-child-heal...): “Research Finds Interaction With Father, Not Mother, Affects Child Health”
* https://firstfivenebraska.org/blog/6-ways-children-benefit-f... provides a catalog of evidence and reported benefits
Does that count as ambition? Doesn't really matter. The basic tension described here is strong, in any case, between work and family.