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I was impressed when PG admitted this. Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success (since attention is a zero sum game, and kid

• icelancer 7y ago
  I have two kids and I've achieved a lot since having them, but Paul's root argument is absolutely correct. I've staved off a lot of the deterioration by investing tons of money into systems that make family life easier, rather than fight things like house cleaning services and such from a point of "efficiency." I have far fewer material things, a very basic house, and not very nice cars, but an equally important shift is your financial mindset on helping your family's stability today as well as into the future. Re-reading this, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Wish I could reword it, but it's how I feel, I guess. Maybe it'll help someone out there. Having kids is tough!
  • bitcoinmoney 7y ago
    Can you talk about all of the systems you employ to make your efficiency higher?
    • icelancer 7y ago
      I am by no means rich by Hacker News standards, and I live a very modest life in a modest home. The money I do have, I use on a personal assistant, housecleaning services, a nanny, and other things that allow me to be as productive as possible at work so when I'm at home, I can maximize family time with the kids and my partner. I very much believe in the ego depletion theory (though I know, it's not been reproduced) - the more choices I have to make in a sub-arena, the more fatigued I get, and the lower self-control I have. I've just admitted to myself that I am poor at time management, so I've outsourced a lot of things to my personal assistant (whom I would never hire in the past given my income bracket). We have a housecleaner service despite the fact that I'm perfectly capable of cleaning the house, but in doing so I just pile up more tasks that I really don't want to do. I've had these discussions with other people in my income bracket who say they can't afford to get help around the house, but they drive Teslas, have super nice clothes, buy expensive TVs / electronics, eat out a lot, go on posh vacations... it's about what you prioritize your money towards. I spend a huge amount of my money on my family and their needs, and I want for very little in my personal life. I see it this way: I'm an entrepreneur, getting to do my thing. That's enough for me. I don't need nice stuff or to go to foreign lands; all the clothes I wear are free from vendors or cheaply purchased at Old Navy / Goodwill / etc. My family emotionally supports my self-employment, which is more than anyone can ask for in this life. They deserve everything else.
• nostromo 7y ago
  I've wondered if a lot of the bias against older people in tech is actually a bias against parents of young children. Obviously age and parenting are tightly correlated. I've worked with a lot super smart folks that are older and, thinking back, their kids were old enough to not be a constant concern, or they never had kids. They seem to have both the energy to be focused at work and also a lot of knowledge that someone a few years out of college doesn't yet have. I've also seen this when one parent is a stay-at-home parent, allowing the other parent to be more engaged with work. Obviously we should be compassionate to people with young kids at home and not hold it against them, because civilization requires a certain number of people to procreate.
• yodsanklai 7y ago
  > Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success Don't most successful people have kids (just like anybody else)? Also, many people just don't take care of their kids. There are many mono-parental families out there.
  • WarOnPrivacy 7y ago
    > Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success > Don't most successful people have kids (just like anybody else)? I imagine both those things are true. > Also, many people just don't take care of their kids. There are many mono-parental families out there. I became a single parent when my wife developed mental illness (which was like getting 5 more kids). In my case self-employment allowed me to be present a lot more often than most single parents can. Nevertheless, the overriding truth is that nearly every sq inch of modern western society is stacked against single parents.
• watwut 7y ago
  > Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success I really don't think this is true statistically. Plenty of outliers with kids, as far as kids go. Moreover, argument is not true, especially for men. Many men leave most of care and career sacrifice on their wifes. They may be slightly inconvenienced by kids here and there, but actually spend equal or even more time in work then before. (Cause home isore boring and wife less friendly now)
  • georgewsinger 7y ago
    Name 5 people who will be remembered in 100 years and who had kids before starting their Grand Project. It's pretty hard.
    • cadlin 7y ago
      Every single one of the past five presidents?
      • diehunde 7y ago
        what project would that be?
    • WarOnPrivacy 7y ago
      They tend to launch both simultaneously (eg: Henry Ford). Reality might skew a little in tech because of some high profile successes that occurred while founders were absurdly young.
      • GoblinSlayer 7y ago
        I heard, Bill Gates' mother helped him with the start.
    • watwut 7y ago
      Honorable mention: Anthony Fauci but he won't be remembered in 100 years. But, who will? J.k.Rowling, Donald Trump, Barack Obama. Then I am out of ideas, through I can think of both childless and non childless people. Not slowed down by children: Albert Einstein, Joseph Stalin, Goering, Speer. (I happened to read about that period a lot). Bill Gates, Musk also have children, but I don't think business owners are remembered that long. Plus, Elon Musk is not active father. More if sponsor from what I heard. The "remembered after 100 years" basically limits me to politicians making massive changes. But if you check those who won Nobel prize, they have plenty children too. And writers have them too. Seriously, career of males are not much harmed by children. It used to be an advantage even
• jlos 7y ago
  >> It's basically a sign that you've retired/don't have anything that important left to contribute other than steady-state levels of productivity. That's a pretty blinkered perspective. For the large majority of people, your children are the most impactful thing you contribute. Say you have 2 kids. You marginally reduce your contribution to care for them but in return they contribute two whole lifetimes worth. Way more than you would ever add to your career. Of course there's prudence in planning, but there are other ways to define your success and contribution other than your immediate economic utililty.
• grahamburger 7y ago
  An alternate approach is to have kids young while you work through the grind-ier stages of your career and then do your high impact work when they're teenagers / young adults. One benefit of this approach is that even if your attention is sometimes away from them during that stage in their life they still get to see what you're doing, and if you take time when you can to talk to them about it they'll feel at least a little bit involved. In my experience sometimes bringing what you're learning as a parent out in the real world back home to them can be very engaging for them. School can be very mundane, and a glimpse in to how the real world works can be very enlightening. When I first became a parent I thought it would be great if I could just stay home with my kids all the time and not have to go to work. I thought that would be better for them and me, and concluded that's what I'd do if I ever had fuck-you money. Then when they got old enough to have conversations with (3-4 yo) I realized that they really engaged with conversations about things outside their daily lives, which for better or worse can be very routine. If I wasn't going to work I wouldn't have much to tell them that they don't already know. And again for better or worse, young kids and teens tend to see anything that happened before they were born as ancient irrelevant history, so I'm not sure that telling stories about the glory days of past contributions would have the same impact. Lastly, if you'll pardon a bit of good-natured snark, while > Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success is certainly true, > Empirically, people almost never achieve outlier levels of success Is almost equally true!
• edanm 7y ago
  > Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success That's ridiculous. Do you have any way of backing that claim up? If you're using the word "empirically", you should have.
• gjm11 7y ago
  People in any category "almost never achieve outlier levels of success"; that's what "outlier" means. If you mean that people with children achieve outlier levels of success much less often than people without children, then I think you owe us some of the evidence implied by that word "empirically". J S Bach had 21 children. Karl Friedrich Gauss had 6 children. Warren Buffett has 3 children. Rembrandt van Rijn had 5 children. Isambard Kingdom Brunel had 3 children. Charles Dickens had 10 children. Charles Darwin had 10 children. The only one of those I picked on the basis of knowing about their children was Bach; the others were the first super-eminent people in their fields who occurred to me that I didn't know were childless.
  • danenania 7y ago
    Modern examples (like Warren Buffett) are probably better, since most of those men lived during times when there were almost zero expectations placed on fathers, apart from making an income. Men could almost completely ignore their children without their spouse, the children, or anyone else seeing it as a problem.
    • gjm11 7y ago
      OK, let's stick with modern examples. We already had Warren Buffett. Some very rich tech people: Bill Gates, 3 children; Larry Ellison, 2 children; Jeff Bezos, 4 children; Mark Zuckerberg, 2 children. (I just picked some rich tech people and checked whether they had children; no deliberate cherry-picking here.) The most recent Nobel prize in physics went to Jim Peebles (3 children), Michel Mayor (3 children), and Didier Queloz (haven't been able to find out, so maybe none?). I'm not going to spend ages looking up stats for every area of human achievement, and maybe it turns out that all these people had children after achieving success (lots of us non-outliers, after all, wait to have children until we're reasonably secure financially), but at any rate it certainly doesn't seem as if highly successful people are unusually likely not to have children at all.
      • danenania 7y ago
        Yeah, those are better ones, and I do agree with you despite the quibbling.
• masonic 7y ago
  people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success People can have kids and pay little (positive) attention to them. Bing Crosby and Johnny Carson, for example.