Source: europe.wsj.com
GUEST MENTOR Yee Lee, vice president of engineering at TaskRabbit: My father is an inventor, an entrepreneur, a patent holder, and an engineer. Like me, he is also a tinkerer. He approaches a basement remodeling project like he’s building a cathedral. I inherited his curiosity for tearing things apart and putting things together. It started with small projects like model airplanes, balsa wood rockets, and electronic circuits, then expanded into career-building things for startups.
He is actually a fairly unbalanced guy, my dad. Work defines his life, in many ways it’s his entire identity. He didn’t think about balancing work with family, his approach was to figure out a way to integrate his family with his work by having me help him build things. He understood then what many men working today still feel: there is an unspoken expectation that a father will be the breadwinner and do well by succeeding in his career.
This is a topic that doesn’t get enough discussion. The same tension felt by working mothers today is palpable and relevant for dads. Corporate cultures reward longer hours and tighten the screws on people — men and women — trying to strike a balance between work and life. I’ve met a lot of startup people who look askance when you talk about going home to have dinner with your children, or leaving a meeting to pick your kid up from the school nurse.
I used to be the kind of guy who would pull all nighters, kept a sleeping bag tucked under the desk, and roll my eyes at the idea of leaving early for a family commitment. I’m definitely not that guy anymore. I learned my lesson the hard way. During my time at TipMobile, I was a first-time founder, first-time CEO and first-time dad.
My life was a disaster. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing in my role at the office. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing with this newborn when I went home. I was trying to figure all this stuff out on three hours of sleep a night. This was literally the most challenging time of my entire life, and I’m amazed that my wife put up with me at all during that time. Going through that taught me some important lessons about how to be committed to a company and a family at the same time. Here are the three biggest:
Have the conversation.
Then revisit it again, and again, and again. My wife wanted to focus on being a full-time mom during the stretch of years when our kids are young. She has got an amazing background of her own, with a Ph.D in a scientific field — she had (and continues to have) many career options available to her, and she made a conscious choice that made sense for our family at the time. But circumstances change. Now that our two-year-old son is ready for activities outside of the house, she has started working on a book. Maybe next year she’ll take a position in industry or start her own company. Maybe she won’t. It’s a continuous, ongoing conversation for us, we ask each other things like: “Have you thought any more about what you’d want to work on when the kids are both in school?” and “If there were no limits on your time, what would you want to work on?” It’s not enough to have one conversation, one time. You and your partner need to revisit, revisit, revisit.
