The Thing About Being a Dad Is That It’s Not About You
I figured this out later than I should have.
For most of my life, the scorecard was pretty simple. Am I getting better at my craft? Am I building something? Is the work moving forward? I could measure all of it. I knew where I stood.
Then I had a kid and the scorecard disappeared.
Nothing I built mattered the same way. Not because it mattered less — if anything the stakes got higher — but because the point shifted. I wasn’t the main character anymore. I’m not sure I ever was, but fatherhood makes that hard to ignore.
The shortcut I keep coming back to is this: almost everything that used to feel urgent isn’t.
The email can wait. The project will still be there. The thing you’re stressed about at 11pm has a 90% chance of being irrelevant by Thursday. Kids don’t care about your deadlines. They care about whether you showed up, whether you were actually there when you were there, whether you laughed at the thing they thought was funny even when you’d heard it four times.
That’s the whole job. Everything else is logistics.
I work in a world that rewards obsession. The more you know, the faster you move, the more you build — the better. I genuinely love that. I’m not complaining about it. But it trains you to optimize for the wrong things when you get home.
You can’t optimize fatherhood. There’s no dashboard. No conversion rate. No metric that tells you you’re doing it right.
What you have is presence or you don’t. And if you don’t, your kid notices before you do.
The irony is that becoming a dad made me better at work too. Not because I got more efficient, though that happened. But because I stopped caring about the stuff that didn’t matter, and there’s a lot of stuff at work that doesn’t matter.
When you’ve got someone at home who needs the real version of you — not the productive version, not the impressive version, just you — it recalibrates everything.
I build systems now partly because I want more time. More time for the work I actually care about, sure. But mostly more time to be somewhere else when it counts.
The shortcuts I’m most interested in these days aren’t the ones that make me more money. They’re the ones that give me more Tuesday afternoons.
That’s what I’m building toward. I’m not sure I’ve figured it out yet.
But I know what I’m building for.