Closing Thoughts as a Parent-Entrepreneur

Emotional.

Unpredictable.

Time-consuming.

A long-term commitment.

That’s parenting in a nutshell.

It demands a great deal of discipline—not just with your children but with yourself. It requires giving your all and then a little extra.

Nothing less. Everything more.

Before I was married, I told my husband, Mathieu, that I wanted four. A big family, I thought, would bring a special kind of vibrancy that was ideal for growth. I mean, I love kids. I love working with them. I love being around them. Gosh! Kids was specifically designed to do all that through the creative arts. And since my life intertwines with them a great deal, parenting, I thought, shouldn’t be that hard of a job.

There’s an interesting story from the sixties about an iconic Beat party. Allen Ginsberg was the host, among them writer Jack Kerouac, in his usual drunken state. The scene was all vice—drugs, ideas, money, romance. It’s the kind of party that every young and aspiring artist would dream of attending, and once they got there, never wanted to leave.

But that’s exactly what Diane di Parma did. Her babysitter was waiting, she explained.

“Unless you forget about your babysitter,” Kerouac said in front of everyone, “you’re never going to be a writer.” Di Parma, fully aware of the resounding belief that having children is the end of one’s creative pursuit, left anyway.

“She believed she wouldn’t have been a writer if she’d stayed,” Julie Philips wrote in her book around creativity and motherhood, The Baby on the Fire Escape, “To write and come home on time required the same discipline: ’a practice of keeping her word.’”

In a similar sense, I relate to di Parma.

When Mathieu and I restarted Gosh! Kids after a sixteen-month hiatus, we knew we were operating on a different ground than before. The rules have changed, not because of the pandemic, but because we’ve changed. We no longer possess the same level of energy, and our time is now split with a growing toddler. Juggling parenting duties and running a business was a game we’d never played. One person cannot do two full-time jobs: Parenting is a full-time job, running a business is a full-time job. But two people can do three full-time jobs, or at least enough to keep their heads above water. There were times when we had to sacrifice certain aspects of the business because we wanted to put family first, and as much as we avoided it, we employed the help of the extended family while we ran off to get the job done.

To deny oneself of the party and leave early—to live a life, in this sense, as a parent-entrepreneur—was our reality.

Recently, a friend of mine became a parent. This begets the question: What do new parents do in the first days and weeks after they cross the divide?

You master the art of diaper-changing. You acquire the skills to cleanse, nourish, attire, and cradle a baby, and to regard it with affection. Time seems to slow, and emotions intensify. In this state, you become vulnerable—you’ve sliced out a part of your heart for someone else who matters more than you do. After months of the same thing, you finally grasps the meaning of sacrifice.

I caught myself flinching at the tiredness on their faces. No parent will miss the long nights. The crying. The fatigue. NO PARENT! “Your world will change,” another friend once told me while I was pregnant with my boy, “and you’re gonna miss your precious sleep.”

Yes, I do miss my sleep. But that’s the truth. That's our reality.

There’s this law called the Hofstadter’s Law which states that it always takes longer than you think it’s going to take. In all aspects—work, life, creativity—it’s going to take all the time it needs, and all the time it wants, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

I believe there’s a parenting version of this.

When you consider the complexities of raising a family, it requires more than what you think is required—more time, more energy, more responsibilities, more emotions, more unpredictability. And it’s certainly a long commitment on your part to get through the days, months, and years of watching your child grow. To reinforce a certain habit, attitude, behavior, and to ensure your child survives—even when you take Hofstadter’s version into account—it will take a long time and a long-term commitment to that pursuit.

And with the limited time you already have, what remains for yourself?

The word Mathieu and I have chosen for ourselves in 2024 is: ACCELERATION. Accelerated learning. Accelerated creating. Accelerated pursuits—claiming what we believe to be our purpose and converging everything we have into making it come alive. And when our resources are limited, there comes a viciousness to say NO to things that may seem important or urgent.

Before the Author Ryan Holiday became a dad, a fellow writer gave him a word of advise: “Work, family, scene,” he said, “Pick two.”

​Actor Matthew McConaughey also said it interestingly: “I was making B’s in five things. I want to make A’s in three things.” Those three things: his family, his foundation, his acting career. I’m a wife to a great husband, a mother to a growing toddler. Every time I say yes to another takes away the time I’ve promised to set aside for the two most important people in my life. How much thinner can the slice be?

Your effectiveness as a parent can only be as good as the things you laser focus on. What are those things for you?

And, no—you can’t have it all.

Love, as I’ve heard from Zig Ziglar, is also spelled as T-I-M-E. So who should we give this valuable resource to? Our families? Or some random request? How important are those things that are constantly seeking our attention—the attention reserved for our loved ones? Does it warrant us to exchange our presence for another insignificant task?

“You have to start saying no to good things,” Craig Groschel once said, “so you’ll be able to say yes to the best things.” Only the essential should remain. It must remain. There’s no other way around this.

So the question to consider for the new year ahead—in what aspects of your lives as parents are you going to say hell yes! with every hell no? What kind of love—despite the emotions, tiredness, unpredictability—are we going to show our families?

What things are you going doubly-hard on in the year ahead?

On my son’s second birthday, Mathieu and I wrote him a letter that outlined ten things we hope he would carry through his life. One of them was:

Detach yourself from everyone else’s definition of success. Whatever is important to you may not be important to others. Whatever is important to others may not be important to you. We’re all playing different games, with different rules, different systems, and different end goals. Using another person’s yardstick to measure your progress will mean that you’ll forever be two steps behind. It’s a game that you cannot win. Instead, focus on competing with only one person — yourself. Identify what makes you happy, what you consider fulfilling, and do everything you can to reach that point.

What makes our family successful? What makes me a successful father, a successful mother? What’s my 2024 going to look like for my family, and on what conditions am I going to measure myself against?

More importantly, who am I doing these for?

When you mess up and feel like you need to get another go at it, which you will, fall back onto the fundamentals. Fall back on the why. Don’t quit because it’s the next best option. Don’t quit because reality did not level with your expectations.

I read somewhere that people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can in ten. True transformation, as a parent, then, happens somewhere in between. It's a voyage of self-discovery that you have to commit your life to.

I’ll leave you with this: one day you’ll stand face to face with yourself—an imperfect parent who has, in the past years, broken resolutions, spent more time doom-scrolling than being present with your kids, lied to them, hurt them, compare them with others. There will be a bunch of things you'll regret doing and you're going to regret them hard. Despite all that, the most beautiful thing about life is that, even when we’ve fallen short, it deals you second chances—sometimes three, sometimes four—to get another go at it.

You’ll stumble. You’ll mess up for sure. As parents, you’ll feel like giving up. That’s because you’re not done yet.

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert says:

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.

We all want the best for our families. Yet we’re afraid of screwing up. It’s a common misconception to interpret failure as a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence, as Ed Catmull writes, of doing something new, and, as such, should be seen as valuable.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” And never allow fear to live in your head rent-free, because all of you recognise that there’s one thing in us more powerful than fear itself. For me, the most frightening thing, as a parent, is for my son to lack passion and purpose in life. I'll do whatever I can, as a mother, to make sure that doesn't happen.

What’s yours? What's that one thing that drives you?

Wherever the roads may lead, I’d fall back onto what my favorite children’s author, Dr. Seuss, said in his perennial favorite: “Life’s a Great Balancing Act.”

Life is all about trade-offs. Parenting is all about trade-offs. It's about self-discipline. It's about recognising that there's someone who matters more than you do.

It's about empowering the next generation to live for a purpose, to transform them from passive consumers into active creators.

It’s about doing as much as the not-doing.

Happy new year,
Miss G (@gladyssoh)