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

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!