You Are Responsible for What You Have Tamed

I have a client. Her husband was a second-generation American; a Yale-educated lawyer who worked in the family business that was started by his father, a Russian immigrant. Four years ago he was diagnosed with cancer. He put up a great fight, but cancer won and a year later he was gone, at 66.

He left $100 million, which went to his wife, son and daughter (the kids are in their late 20s). I had a meeting with the family recently. The son’s wife was a few days away from giving birth to a baby girl. As the son and I were talking about his upcoming fatherhood, I asked him what kind of father he wants to be. He said, “I don’t want to be like my father.” I was a bit surprised and asked why.

He said:

After my father passed away, his friends would tell me how he was this larger-than-life, gregarious man. I never saw that man. My father worked 16-hour days, seven days a week. He worked in the basement – he’d come up for dinner and go back down. He never spent time with me or my sister. My mom did everything, from driving us to school to taking me to football practice. I always felt like I was raised by my mother. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be there for my kids.

He went on:

My father thought till the last moment that he’d beat the cancer, and so he never expressed his true feelings to me or my sister. A year later my father’s friend told me that my father confided in him that he wished he’d spent more time with us kids.

Listening to him, I felt a sudden urge to run home and hug my children. I also felt enormous sadness. I was thinking, what if he had worked eight or maybe even ten hours a day instead of 16 and left his kids $10 million rather than $100 million? Would it really have made a difference to his kids’ lives? They are wonderful, thoughtful young adults who don’t have pretentious lifestyles. His son would probably trade all his money for a father who was there for him.

I was deeply impacted by this story because, as a father who runs a business, I was asking myself, am I doing the same thing to my kids?

And then, a few days later, it came to time to drive my 18-year-old, Jonah, to the airport. He was taking a gap year after graduating high school and will spend the next two semesters in Israel. He’ll be taking classes at American Jewish University, doing internships, touring Israel, and discovering himself.

When your kids leave for college, you somehow get to look back at your life through a different lens. You start asking yourself, did I spend enough time with them? Before Jonah boarded the plane, we exchanged letters (it was his idea); my wife and I wrote a letter to him and he wrote one to us and his sisters. There was a paragraph in his letter that put tears in my eyes:

Thank you for using your time to create great memories with me while still balancing everything else that you do. … A while ago you read a book about Warren Buffett. In this book it talked about how Warren wished he had spent more time with his kids. You were worried that you weren’t spending enough time with me. Don’t worry, I can happily say that you were and are a great father. I have never in my life felt that you didn’t spend enough time with me.

This stands above anything else I have accomplished in my life. Everything else feels somehow temporary and insignificant.

I remember when Jonah was a few years old, I held his tiny hand and I was thinking, “What will he be like when he grows up?” I was trying to picture him as an adult – I could not. Now I see an adult, standing at 6’3”, with a deep voice, a great sense of humor, curly hair, and a kind heart.

Today I look at my two girls and try to imagine them growing up. Just like with Jonah, I cannot. But they will. I have only five years and 13 years left, respectively, before Hannah and Mia Sarah leave home. And though it feels far off, the time will fly, just like it did with Jonah.

After we hugged Jonah and put him on the plane, my wife looked at my daughters (Hannah is 13, Mia Sarah is five) and said, “You are not going anywhere; you’ll be home-colleged!”

I share my wife’s sentiment. Intellectually, you know that your kids will grow up, but you want to slow down the process as much as possible. Still, you know this day will come and the only thing you can do is spend as much time as you can with them while they still live under the same roof. And when the time comes for them to leave, you just don’t want to let them go.

Tim Urban estimated that by the time you finish high school, you have spent 93% of the total time you’ll ever spend with your parents. Today I spend at least six hours a day with my kids and another 20 hours on weekends. When kids live in your house they are completely dependent on you, especially younger ones.

Let’s take Mia Sarah and Hannah, for example. Neither one drives, of course, and my wife won’t let them past the porch without adult supervision (she’d put a leash on Mia Sarah if she could). When they go to college, get married, and have their own offspring, we’ll be lucky to see them six hours a month (though I hope it will be more than that).

Now I want to set a new, higher standard for myself when I spend time with my kids. I recently read that “attention is the currency of time.” I want to make sure that when I spend time with my girls, I am there with them 100%, not thinking about a stock or a book I just read, but giving them my full attention. One more thought.

As an entrepreneur, you always want to grow your business. Your current revenue and profit are never enough; they just set the bar higher for next year. We always want more. But this “more” has a hidden cost: time with our family. It’s my core responsibility to provide for my family, but at some point I (and maybe some of my readers) might say that more is not worth it.

Sometimes work for us is a game – a real-life version of Candy Crush. Where money is not a currency that buys us material stuff, but chips that we never intend to spend. These chips are just there to keep count of our successes – they are the currency that move us to the next level, and the next level. Just as we can mindlessly spend tens of hours playing Candy Crush, our work can turn from being something we do to live into an addiction.

My own father often quoted from The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”