You Can't Have It All: Parenting vs. Career Sacrifices, Life Myths vs. Reality and Intentional Trade-Offs - 406

Jeremy reflected on how becoming a father of 2 daughters has reshaped his self-identity and the complex interplay between career ambitions vs. family responsibilities. He explored the evolving discourse on work-life balance, the brutal reality of trade-offs and the importance of intentional sacrifices. Jeremy tied together insights from Sheryl Sandberg’s "Lean In" movement, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s rebuttal “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All," and Harvard MBA Professor Clayton Christensen’s "How Will You Measure Your Life." Success in both domains requires thoughtful planning, the willingness to ask for help, a great support system, resources and good luck. He also stressed the responsibility of current generations to pay it forward and support future parents through advocacy for family-friendly policies and honest conversations about the realities of balancing career and family life.

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(01:37) Jeremy Au:

Can you have it all? Honestly, the biggest change in my life has been about becoming a dad. It hasn't been easy. It has obviously been a great joy to hang out with my three-year-old and one-year-old girls. And yet, I think it's really shaken my self-identity and self-worth in a way that I really haven't thought about in a long while.

I wanted to share a view about my experience, re-evaluating the books I've read and, more importantly, how I view parenthood, and honestly being a career professional. The sources I'm covering are books like Sheryl Sandberg, "Lean In", as well as "Option B". I'll also be covering Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen's "How Will You Measure Your Life?" As well as Anne Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Can't Have It All."

I was having a wonderful conversation about family and work with a mentor, and I thought it was a fascinating discussion because we ended up talking about these books, "Lean In" and "Why You Can't Have It All", which are very much women books that have historically, would be seen as speaking about women careers, but we were talking about in the context of being dads.

Lean In was a movement that had been spearheaded by Sheryl Sandberg that really advocated for women to achieve career success and that you could also push for that on top of having a family. That of course became hugely popular, and I was part of a team that pretty much went out to adapt Lean In as a children's book under the story Brave Becca. And it was a great adaptation for how young girls can avoid losing confidence as they grow and keep up that confidence for themselves.

In fact the middle name for Raden is Rebecca, and that's been nice to have that thread between Brave Becca, the children's book, to Rebecca, the name of my second child. That being said, there was a strong counterpoint by Anne Marie Slaughter, who wrote this fantastic article that I remember is about why women can't have it all. Her reflection on her career in national decision-making, policy-making, and having a family, was that it was very difficult to be able to tell yourself that you could have it all, to have both a career and a family, let alone execute it and do it well on both sides. The harsh truth was that despite her dream to have it all, it was fundamentally a dream and that she had to make sacrifices on both the career and the family front to make it happen.

(03:44) Jeremy Au:

The interesting part is that Sheryl Sandberg herself has evolved from her perspective and that she later wrote the book "Option B", which speaks about the death of a husband in a tragic accident. And basically what happened there was that she had a big reflection that for single parents, it was very difficult for them to lean in because they didn't have the support of another spouse in terms of the childcare and child-rearing duties. That's one, but also of course, you imagine having another breadwinner, and lastly, being a source of emotional support and refuge in a loving relationship. So I think there's a maturation of movement of lean in, which is that for women, you can have both career and family success.

And the awkward reality, of course, is that where we landed on, pretty much a decade on since then, is that there are real-life trade-offs to be made. If you are a nuclear family or single-parent family far away from family support, or without governmental support for child care, then one of the parents will have to take up a lot of that duty, for example, right?

If your family is going through catastrophic medical problems, or bills, or poverty, then obviously it's much harder for you to do that trade-off. And conversely, if you have family wealth, then it's easier for you to do both. If you have the luck of being in a corporate workplace that has the support, for example, recently, there was a great study by Boston Consulting Group, BCG, and a non-profit, Moms First, that showed that at least in America, every one of childcare benefits in terms of helping provide coverage for moms and dads for emergency childcare, led to about one to five dollars of benefits to the corporation because, there was more productivity, right?

The worker was able to come to work instead of having to stay home with the child. So what I'm trying to say here is that maybe you're lucky to be part of a company that's enlightened enough to provide that childcare benefit as well. So there's a lot of environmental pieces that when I say out loud, obviously make sense, which is that we live in a world that's broken and we live in a world that has fundamental trade-offs, right? There are opportunity costs for anything you do. There is a financial and time cost for anything that you choose to do as well. And the truth is that not all of us have the same level of resources or buffers or luck.

Now, I'm not trying to speak for the whole female gender equality at work movement. I think there's one aspect about it, but again, what was fascinating about that context was that my mentor and I, were discussing about in the context of us as guys, as dads, and I think the interesting part about it was that this whole debate was happening about whether you can lean in and have career success on top of work, and then on the other side, you can't have it all. You do trade-off, maybe you can do it sequentially. You take your time. You prioritize this, and your kids reach a certain age.

Anyway, the point was this whole debate was happening and this evolution was happening, and therefore we guys were like, "Yeah, we're going to work. We're definitely going back to work. We're definitely not going to lean out from work. We're definitely going to be dads and we're going to spend a lot of time at work." So it's funny that I was reading this stuff because I was curious. Obviously, I was in the childcare and education industry, and so I think that was very much part of my homework in terms of what needed to be done on top of my personal interests. But, it was just funny that, for all the guys, it was very much felt, "Okay, we're just going to go to work. We're going to succeed at work because we want to succeed at work." Our identity is success at work. Our partners want us to succeed at work. Society wants us to succeed at work. And we are going to be enlightened. We're going to do more diaper changes. We're going to help out the family more. We're going to do more pick up and drop off.

But I think we just never had that philosophical debate, if you really think about it. We never had that to and fro societally about it. It's hey, our expectation and our self expectations is that we're going to go to work. The truth is, I still want to go back to work, of course, and my intention is to be a success.

(07:12) Jeremy Au:

At the core of it, the dark humor about it is that women are explicitly deciding between career and family. For men, it often is an unconscious choice, which that we are defaulting to work. And again, I'm not trying to say that one is better than the other. Obviously, if you choose work, then that comes first. If you choose family, that comes first. Obviously, I respect the choice. But I think what I'm trying to highlight is that being conscious, being intentional about that choice is really important. Obviously, the easiest way to dodge this is to tell yourself that you already have it all, that the current balance of the percentage you spend on work and the percentage you spend on time is correct. If it's 90-10, to you, it feels like 100-100, right? Or maybe it's 10-90, and then you tell yourself, "Hey, that's perfect," that is also 100-100. And I think that feels really good. That's a very affirming and very hopeful and I think it's very much the positive way of looking at things, which is that, hey, the way that you're doing things is 100% correct because there was no sacrifice being made. There's no trade-off being made and nothing was lost, right?

And yet, it's also fundamentally unsatisfying to me, adding to many of my dad friends as well, because we kind of know that it's not true. right? There are sacrifices. We know that obviously at work, it's like, "Hey, do I play basketball for exercise and for my own health versus do I go to work and work on that last-minute presentation?" There's a trade-off, right? And so if you're talking about the trade-off between your work and your family, then of course there's a trade-off. So I think that kind of superficial glossing over the actual trade-off honestly is a disservice and also really not very satisfying as a form of encouragement, not very satisfying as a way of self-talk.

That reminds me of the book, "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Professor Clayton Christensen. And he did a great job talking about sacrifice and opportunity costs. And of course, he talked about it in that language that we all love as professionals, which is a business language. So he talks about enterprises and trade-offs and strategies about how you choose things to do and choose not to do different things. And then he applies that same concept pretty much effectively to us as individual units, not just economically, but in terms of family. For example, he shared about his own choice that he decided to be a present father for his children as much as possible, and that he chose to make sacrifices because he felt not uncomfortable with outsourcing his child's education to somebody else. And of course, he used some examples talking about how companies have to make a choice about whether to in-house their own production and manufacturing versus outsourcing it. And I thought it was hilarious because obviously, this is the kind of advice that you get from your parent or from friends, but now he's just using it in business language and aha, me as a Harvard MBA, I totally click with that language because I look at everything through a business and economic lens. So what is the solution?

(09:43) Jeremy Au:

The solution is, step one, recognizing reality, that there is the hard reality of our world with physical constraints and physical laws and that there are both costs, monetary and time, as well as opportunity costs for every choice you make. This is true for any company, right? You can't do 10 different products and 10 different geographies. You have to prioritize and make decisions about what you actually prioritize. And so obviously, the choice for good companies versus bad companies is, did you reactively end up in that strategy, or did you proactively, consciously, intentionally choose that business strategy?

So for us as individuals, if we're doing this for corporations, then we are the VP of Strategy, that we're the General Manager, that we're the executive, that we're the founder, we're doing this level of conscious strategy for a company, then we should be having that same level of rigor for our own family planning. We need to have that same level of conversation, that hard conversation with our significant others about that.

If we have kids we have to be deliberate, and intentional about that choice. What's the budget? What's the household? What kind of education and tuition should they have? Where are they going to live? Are we prioritizing them to grow emotionally resilient? What kind of values do you want them to have? Who's going to be in their life? These are really deep and difficult conversations because in the end, what's the cost of those decisions if you make a choice about one school means they can't go to another school. If you're sending them on a set of extracurricular activities, they can't do other extracurricular activities. If they're part of one community, they can't be part of another community. So we recognize that and we just have to be thoughtful about that.

The second part is really about being thoughtful about the sequencing, which is that I think for many middle-class families, I think that you can maneuver away to kind of have it all, but maybe sequentially and tag teaming. So sequentially means that maybe you work on your career now, then family later, and then after, we do work again, or maybe it's the other way around. You do family first at work, then family. And then you really need to tag the team. And I think this is where for people who are, obviously parents in a dual parent dynamic, but if you're a single parent, I think having the help of family or government or something else as well is really important, and I think it really goes back to that quote of "It takes a village to raise a child." It's just a fundamental fact that a child is not an atomic unit. They are a human who is a sponge who wants to hang out with people, lots of different people, so they want to be part of daycares. They want socialization. They want to hang out with other kids. They want to hang out with uncles and aunts and grandparents parents and friends and younger siblings. It's just a normal biological person, not an atomic unit of economic work or cost. What I'm trying to say here is let's not be afraid to try to plan and sequence it sequentially, but also tag-teaming as many people as possible. So the corollary to that is don't be afraid to ask for help.

Lastly, we need to pay it forward. And what that means is that, if we as parents see that other parents are struggling, we should help them. We should be honest about our own struggles. And if there's a new parent or somebody who's aspiring to be a parent, we should be honest and frank in our conversations about what kind of career trade-offs or sacrifices that we have had to make ourselves, because that helps them, you know, not be in La La Land or Fairyland and kind of like hitting a brick wall. We want them to basically have the opportunity to know that reality as much as possible and then plan proactively, which is that if things are going to be tough in one year's time, then, having one year to prepare is a tremendous gift versus, being clueless and like running to a brick wall in one year's time and then you're like Hey, I wish that somebody had told me this earlier anyway. Now why didn't he tell or she tell me about this earlier?

So I think being honest about that is really important, but also I think paying forward also means that we should really help not just new parents or expecting parents, but also, the parents of future generations, right? We don't want humanity to die out.

I'm going to assume there's 99.9% of people who want that. And we want people to continue to have lots of kids. We want them to be future generations. We want them to grow up in a world that is better, not worse. And so, we really should be thoughtful in advocating for policies in our own workplace. We should be, honestly looking to see how we can expand health insurance in our companies to cover not just our spouses, but also our dependents, right?

And we should be supportive of other people who are advocating for that. We should be supportive of childcare benefits because it helps the family, but also because it benefits the company economically with a 1x to 5x return on ROI, but also because it's the right moral thing to do, right? And so, this means that we can all be thoughtful regardless of the family structure we have, whether it's single families or double families, whether you're a woman or a man, I think that if we're choosing in the context of family, the key identity that we're saying is, we want to be parents and we want to be supportive for other parents, not just in our generation, but for all future generations as well. And so being thoughtful about this at policymaking, at the electoral level, at the corporate level, and at our individual levels and in the village level, these are all areas that we need to be helpful and pay it forward as much as we can.

On that note, I'm going to go and hang out with my kids a little bit more and see you next time.