Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"Can I Be a Great Parent AND a Great Entrepreneur? Help!"
Mon, 23 Dec 2024
This week, the Money Rehab feed will be taken over by Nicole's favorite episodes of Help Wanted, the podcast she cohosts with Jason Feifer. In this episode, Jason and Nicole explore a taboo topic: the give-and-take struggle between a demanding career and parenthood. Jason and Nicole have noticed a reticence in others to talk about this experience for fear of judgment or misunderstanding, but in this conversation, Jason and Nicole speak honestly. Plus, Nicole uses this episode to tell Jason her big news!
Chapter 1: What challenges do parents face while managing a career?
We could talk about that, but I think it's just fine to live in the complexity of having lost things as kids and that the life choice that you made was complicated and that's okay.
Yeah. Do you think there's a scale of regret? It's not binary, like I regret having kids or I don't, or maybe there are some days that you do or some days that you resent your kids or career opportunities that you can't do or weddings that you can't really enjoy or whatever.
Yes. Anybody who has older kids wants to reach into this episode right now and say, It gets easier. It gets easier. Little kids are really, really hard. And that's true. And I've heard that over and over again. And every time people tell me that, I'm like, I hear that. I'm waiting to see it. But it's also disingenuous because a nine-year-old and a five-year-old is way easier than like a...
five-year-old and a one-year-old. So my life has gotten easier. I am able to move around more than I used to. I don't get woken up by screams in the morning, which is what happens when you have a kid that's just like three. And I suspect that when my kids are older and they're not exhausting in the way that they are now,
and I have more freedom of movement as an adult in the world, maybe won't even have much of a memory of the kinds of things that were frustrating me at this point in my life. So yeah, I think that it's a scale. And So my wife, Jen, she always tells me a lot of this comes down to the expectations that you set for yourself.
I always complain about family vacations because they're not the kind of vacations that I like to take. I like to go to a city that I've never been to before, and I like to spend the entire day walking around and just discovering random things and eating random things and meeting random people. You can't do that with kids at all, 0%. You cannot do that with kids. So what can you do with kids?
You can go to the beach or you can rent an Airbnb with a pool. I don't care about these things. I don't like these things. And then, of course, you're dealing with, you're going to fill the kids' time. You're going to entertain them. And that's not to say that this is unenjoyable. Yeah, it's fun spending time with the kids, but it's not the way that I would want a vacation.
And so my wife keeps telling me, when we're going on these vacations, you have to understand that this is not the vacation that you would love. This is a different thing. This is family bonding time. And that's going to come with different... roles and different outcomes. And that's true.
If I go down Sunday morning from my bedroom and I think, I'm going to get a lot of work done this Sunday morning, that's going to be great. It's going to make me feel less stressed. And then I'm trying to work and my kids are constantly interrupting me.
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Chapter 2: How can parents balance work and family life?
because the kids were complaining like crazy the whole time. They were on their scooters. Colin, of course, fell halfway through and was screaming his head off. Jen and I can't have a conversation, but the kids are like constantly coming back and forth. I physically walked, but I wouldn't say that it was the relaxing experience that I wanted. But, but it's made me more efficient.
I am a more focused person than I was before. Number two, having kids allows you to relate to other people who have kids, which is actually a really useful business skill. Because talking about your kids is just like often a thing that comes up. I found that to be useful. I am sure that it has created in me some of the things that people say that parenting does.
It makes you a more patient person, more understanding, something. I don't know. I don't know how to evaluate or identify that. Having kids does introduce you to other interesting people. My friend Matt, Matt Elblanc, who's also my book agent, I met him on a playground because our sons had become friends.
And I've met a whole bunch of other people who I really, really like, who sometimes are very useful, both personally and professionally. And I don't mean useful, like whatever, good friends and they become good colleagues through having kids. So yeah, there are upsides, but it's still, it's like upsides that live inside of attention.
So there could be some correlation beyond just your age being the correlation. Like when you started having kids, like you were also hitting a stride in your career.
Yeah, sure. I was. And like anybody, I think you are more refined in your talents. You have a stronger network, just like however much older you get. But having kids certainly didn't hold me back from... I feel... I don't even know how to say it. Maybe a life in which I was able to say, yeah, I have no kids to come home to. So I will just fly around the world doing speaking engagements nonstop.
Maybe I wouldn't like that life. Maybe the quote unquote bigger life is not one that I would actually enjoy or appreciate. There's no way to know, right? This counterfactual thinking is not actually helpful, but it's certainly a tension that I live with.
And to be clear, you wanted kids.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: Are parents afraid to discuss their struggles?
And he wants to spend more time with his kids. Mark Cuban is leaving Shark Tank to spend more time with his kids. And these are not like politician excuses where you're stepping down from something, but because somebody's forcing you. But I think these are genuinely like, they did it. And it was great. And now they're done with it and they want to refocus on this other thing.
And so that's another thing I have to keep reminding myself. I don't know what another parallel version of my life is like, but I can also pretty much guarantee that if I at this moment in my life cannot recognize and be satisfied with the successes that I do have, then I don't think some other set of successes would have made me feel any more satisfied.
It probably would have made me just feel like there's something else to accomplish. My kids are great, right? We've spent almost no time talking about that in this conversation. And that's fine because that's boring. Everyone talks about how great their kids are. It's so boring. Just trust me. They're great. They're great kids. They ask interesting questions. We have fun experiences.
They're great. Getting them cereal in the morning sucks. I'd never want to do it. I definitely never want to wipe an ass ever, but they're great.
They're great. It's the dialectic. It's both things can be true.
The things that come out of their mouth are usually great, even though I don't want to deal with the things that come out of their butt.
That's completely fair. I think the emotional aspect of recognizing those emotions when they come up, high resentment, high regret, like, what's up? Nice to see you again, instead of suppressing it is probably a healthier way. What advice would you give to someone who's expecting and maybe is in an entrepreneurial career and wants to keep up the pace, be an awesome parent with an awesome kid?
I would say- Great parent with a great kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, everybody's life circumstances is going to be different. As you were saying that, the first thing I thought of was make sure you have great communication with your partner. But not everyone has a partner. I have friends who are single parents and they're making it work and are entrepreneurs. You can make anything work.
I think that my advice is simply to tell you, you can make it work. It just requires a lot of thinking and communication and gritting your way through things. There are parts of it that are gonna be hard and they're gonna get easier. And you're not even gonna recognize that they're easier because there are other things that are hard. This is my life right now.
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