I've got two kids, both teenagers now. In my view it's not just that kids are different, but that parents are different too. My impression is that most parenting advice assumes that the parents themselves have unlimited self discipline, organization, and emotional stamina.
I can only assume that the people constructing the advice have a nanny and/or a housekeeper.
A ruined dinner or getting late to swimming are one time events. Teaching your kids that tantrums will "work" in all the wrong ways will affect your life for a long time.
So sometimes we eat burned dinner cuz someone was acting like an asshole. Sometimes play dates "fall through" because someone thought they'd obligate a parent to do something they hadn't even discussed. Good God nothing teaches like bad experiences, and my wife and I can maintain some shred of sanity. Actually that's not fair, our children are a joy ( and exhausting).
It's one thing for your teenager to sob because she didn't have any spending money for the surprise trip somewhere with great shopping because she blew all her money instead of saving it for a great opportunity. It's a completely other thing to have to learn that lesson as an adult.
It's hard enough even with that help. Kids have their own minds and personalities and methods of coping with a vast world they just don't understand and can be overwhelming. One-size-fits-all suggestions such as "never punish" just trivialize how complicated little human beings really are.
That makes children hugely instructive for how to deal with your colleagues. Understand that underneath the facade, everyone has that native wiring that kids lay bear. What kind of things do children respond well to? What do they pull away from? How do you bring the child back to your good side when they're upset?
While the incentives may become more complex with adults, the fundamentals and principles are the same, and children are a powerful lens into the human psyche.
I have an infant. I spend a lot of time with him. During the week I probably take care of him more than my wife does, because she goes to work very early. I also work in a VR startup, scrambling to get projects done. Somehow, I still find time to cook dinner with my wife, watch the latest episode of whatever one TV show we are following, get a few house chores done, and waste time on HN and Twitter. The only times it feels like I'm too busy to get everything done is when I'm wasting too much time on HN and Twitter.
What I don't do is I don't watch very much television and I don't hang out in bars anymore. I'm married so I don't have to chase girls. I don't play video games anymore (hell, I don't even like non-VR games anymore, but we don't have room in our apartment for a Vive, which is the only VR system I would bother with for personal use). I don't go to the gym every day (only days I take the baby to swim class). I don't have any illusions that I'll be a rock-star, so I'm not in any bands.
Every person I know who thinks they are busy are actually just split and confused on their purpose in life. I have a friend who has a boat and a giant home theater system and he has to stay at work for so much overtime to cover the cost of it all he never gets to enjoy either. If he'd admit that he liked watching TV more than he liked fishing, or vice versa, he'd be a lot happier and actually do more. But he doesn't actually do anything extra in that time at work, because overtime is a fallacy and actually anti-productive. So he'd even be getting more done at work if he wasn't... at work all the time!
When you want to do a certain something, you necessarily have to choose to give up doing other things. I want to build a company and a happy family.
You are right, I'm "not very busy". Because being busy is an illusion. It doesn't matter to how much you get done if your TODO list is 10 items long or 100 items long if you can only get through 9 items in a week (and you will definitely find enough items to replace those 9 in that week). Those 90 extra items don't get done whether or not they are on your list. But if they are on your list, you convince yourself you're "busy". If anything, the anxiety of not being able to make even a 10% dent in a gigantic pile of tasks might even hurt your productivity.
[1]: https://www.walden.org/Thoreau/For many poor working people time with their children is a luxury -- but they can't even give them all the other stuff, sometimes not even decent food and shelter, much less an education.
Many rich people do that all the time. If he doesn't think his kids is a "fun project" too, then that's his choice, not something born out of necessity.
>You can't have it both ways.
You can, if you have "fuck you money", which Musk has 10000 times over.
It's the poor people who work 2 shifts and barely have the money to provide for their family that can't have both time and money at the same time.
>I'm sure musk sacrificed father/kid relationships for work success in a major way. It's not possible to have it all.
First of all, nobody mandates that you SHOULD have it all. You can make your own balance and opt to sacrifice maximum work success. Musk is not a slave. If he is a "slave to work success" that's his personal choice.
There are rich people that have excellent in-person, relationships with their kids, and can shun work and meetings for their personal time, whether with kids, spouse, other interests, etc. Gates, for one, stepped down as CEO at 45 and went part-time with MS stuff at 50.
You can have "fuck you money", but you can't have "fuck you time". Sure, the capitalist HN crowd will argue that money can buy you time (e.g. by having people do your chores for you, etc) but ultimately there is a finite amount of bedtime moments, meals, Sunday mornings, etc in your kid's lives. Try as you might, fuck you money won't change that.
I think you've misunderstood the concept of fuck you money, at least as it relates to time.
They don't buy you more time -- they buy you the luxury to be you that decides what you do with your finite time. And bonding with your children is entirely up to you (or Musk's in this example) decision if you have those.
Besides, nobody argued that there's not a "finite amount of bedtime moments, meals, Sunday mornings, etc in your kid's life" -- just that when you are rich it's upon you (and not, e.g. your boss or financial necessities, or drudgery work like cooking, and cleaning and such) to spend more of your time with your kid during those moments.
This is an illusion. Ultimately, you have to choose what is a priority in your life. There will be moments, many of them, where you have to choose between a board meeting or making it to bedtime, or taking a business trip across the world or a weekend spent hiking with your kids.
If you choose too many of the latter, at some point your board will get sick of you, your executives will stop trusting you, etc.
If you're prioritizing the things that let you be the CEO of a company, you're necessarily deprioritizing the things that let you spend the most time with your kids.
The problem with "fuck you money" is that it also easily lets you fuck yourself.
You don't have "fuck you money" if you are still dependent on being CEO to maintain the lifestyle you want. You have fuck you money when whether or not you work is down to what you want rather than what you need.
Notice how you just confirm the same thing I said. So, hardly an illusion.
"Ultimately, you have to choose what is a priority in your life" == "it's you that decides what you do with your finite time"
>There will be moments, many of them, where you have to choose between a board meeting or making it to bedtime, or taking a business trip across the world or a weekend spent hiking with your kids.
That's exactly what I said. Musk gets to chose.
>If you choose too many of the latter, at some point your board will get sick of you, your executives will stop trusting you, etc.
So, at worse you'll be off the board, and still left with b/millions in the bank. And only if you do it all the time.
Still, not the same kind of problem as not being able to spend time with your kids because you work all the time or you'll fall behind on rent and be homeless, etc...
>If you're prioritizing the things that let you be the CEO of a company, you're necessarily deprioritizing the things that let you spend the most time with your kids.
The whole point is that you don't HAVE to "prioritize the things that let you be the CEO of a company".
And you'll still be rich, with a home, with money to educate and feed your children etc if you DON'T.