"Daddy, I Thought You Didn't Have To Work Today."
Getting crushed by a four-year-old.
Last weekend, my son challenged my entire life operating model with nine words.
Hard to squeeze that into the “How was your weekend?” small talk on Monday.
It’s Sunday in the early afternoon. I’m solo parenting - Michelle’s out of the house, getting a breather of some kind (nails or a Starbucks working session...that was 5 days ago, who can remember 5 days ago??).
I’m sitting on a barstool at our kitchen island. Paw Patrol is on in the living room. Amazingly, all three kids are occupying themselves. Two of them are playing in another room, and the third is doing something with dinosaurs on the carpet while Rocky and Zuma argue about whose $2M (taxpayer-funded?) vehicle they take on a mission.
Seeing that I am both alone and unneeded, something that rarely happens when more than two people are home, I pop open my laptop. As a solopreneur, there’s always more to do, and today I need to banter with Claude over some tasks and outlines - stuff that can be interrupted, because it will be.
And five minutes later, it is. My four-year-old is standing in the kitchen, looking at me. He looks legitimately sad, which surprises me, because he was just having fun in the other room and I didn’t hear a scream or a slap.
“What’s wrong, little dude?”
“Daddy, I thought you didn’t have to work today.”
Oh, shit. Busted. He’s right. This is one of those moments that, if I had missed it, I’d want back - working instead of playing with him. I close the laptop immediately, thankful that he said something, and play with him for a little while...until I slink away to write for an hour at Starbucks before picking up a grocery order.
It wasn’t until journaling about it later that those nine words seriously fucked me up.
Sacred Hours
My wrist is vibrating. It’s 5 AM again.
I roll away from a snoozing Michelle, untangle myself from the sheets, and move before my inner bitch reaches up from the pillow and pulls me back. The exit from the bed is necessarily silent: waking the missus (or the snoozing pup in his cage at the foot of the bed) would ruin everything.
I peel my eyelids back and tiptoe into the bathroom. From there, I leave my phone charging (not today, Satan) and take the back way out into my kitchen: closet -> laundry room -> hallway. Somewhere along this dark journey, I will step on a Hot Wheels car or a rogue Lego.
In the kitchen, I procure two drinks: one for caffeine, one for hydration (LMNT for the morning win).
In my office, I sit at my “analog” desk, the one without any tech, and look at my tools: a notecard, a simple timer, a blank pad, and a pen. It’s 5:05. Time to get to work.
The analog desk is a new seat for my morning “ritual.” The temptation to fuck about on the internet - check email, check LinkedIn, check where the unnecessary impulse buys are en route to my house - proved too mighty for my slow-booting mental system.
I used to fight it. Now, I just avoid it entirely to start.
I look back at the notecard: three topics to write about. That’s all I get to pick from. One long-form, two short-form. Which one do my eyes circle back to more than once? That’s the first victim.
I set a 30-minute timer and begin to write.
The first sentences are trash - they wouldn’t hook a drunken salmon.
But I keep writing.
Some sentences look good. The rest could have been constructed by my six-year-old.
The scratch-outs begin. The rewrites are marginal improvements.
Holy shit! A truly great sentence out of nowhere. A gift from the Muse for doing the only thing I’m in control of: getting out of bed and planting my ass in this chair to write.
The page is more than half-full now. Soon, it’s full. I’m writing on the back.
The timer goes off. Now, I’m moving to my “digital” desk with my handwritten page (occasionally pages) to keep going. I look at the clock. 5:40. I have another hour til the kids are up.
I have momentum. My only job now is to not hit the brakes.
I’ve done this for nearly a year now, and now, I’ve done it another day.
I’ll do it again tomorrow. And the day after that, and the day after that. Whether I’ve slept well, slept like shit, stayed up too late, woke up with a whiny toddler at 4 AM...these are inconsequential factors.
I’ve had some solid wins, but not the breakthrough.
Don’t care. My job is to show up and do the work.
My wrist vibrates. Just like that, it’s 6:45. I hear Michelle walking up the stairs to wake the three kiddos. I’m into the kitchen to make breakfast and lunches.
The chaos of getting them out the door and driving them to multiple schools.
The day job.
The sports practices and playtime.
The dinner, bath, and bedtime routine.
The night-time chores.
Collapsing into bed, the last thing I do is check my wrist to make sure my alarm is set:
5 AM.
Writing My Way Into Hell
Of course, that’s the ideal. (Yes, right now, that’s my ideal).
But there are legit disruptions. Over the last 18 days, our family has had parainfluenza, croup, RSV, sinus infections, double ear infections, and now ‘human metapneumovirus’ (whatever the fuck that is).
Yeah, sorry. I’m not David Goggins or Jocko Willink. That derails the Radice clan.
So when the Sacred Hours are shortened or disappear altogether, I try to make up for it. Sometimes at Starbucks for a concentrated work block. Sometimes in the kitchen, in the margins, when the kids are playing, and I’m alternating between the scenery and the butler.
But journaling that night, I stumble upon a revelation that hurts so deeply that I almost wish I had stayed ignorant of it.
The disappointment in his voice.
It wasn’t “in-the-moment” disappointment, like when I tell him he can’t have Oreos at 10 AM. It was accumulated disappointment.
Which means this is not the first time he’s been sad that I’m working instead of being with him.
Glad I have a Miller Lite next to me as I write. I down it and keep going down the gruesome rabbit hole.
The kids know not to interrupt Dad when he’s working. It still happens because they’re still kids, but on the whole, they’re pretty good about it. And they know I do a lot of work on a computer.
So...anytime I’m doing work around them, I’m sending the signal not to bug me. Which means, I’m sending the signal that I’m unavailable.
The Miller Lite is now empty. I need another one.
I thought I was in the background. Instead, I was a “road closed” sign.
How many moments had this adorable little kid wanted to play with me, but didn’t approach me because he saw me typing? Let’s triple the terror, because if it’s happened with him, it’s happened with his older and younger brothers, too.
My perspective had been totally different. I thought I was modeling something for them: that you have to work hard for your dreams, that your Mom and Dad put in a lot of effort to build something that matters to them. I was hoping to inspire them to follow their passions and get good at something that brings them joy.
My four-year-old doesn’t care about that, though. He’s not thinking of career paths or following passions or avoiding getting stuck on the non-partner track at a consulting job or whatever particular brand of corporate poison I hope he can avoid.
He wants to play King Kong fighting Godzilla. And instead of attacking, King Kong is arguing with a fucking robot.
What’s worse: King Kong is sending the signal that “work” is more important than Godzilla.
I close the journal and go get another beer.
Prioritizing Failure
The day before I went live with The 2nd Act Launchpad, my biggest worry was that if I filled all five founding slots in the first few days, I wouldn’t have enough time to get to all five clients every week or so.
I didn’t need to worry about that at all.
A week after the launch, nobody had purchased a single slot.
Sitting in the kitchen, I’m not grinding away on client deliverables or something else that would have signaled success. I’m disassembling a failure. I am surprisingly emotionally detached from it, so I guess I have grown up a little bit, but still - that’s what was on the task list for the day.
So when I hear, “Daddy, I thought you didn’t have to work today,” it’s pretty easy to close the laptop. Both because I want to be with him, and because I am happy to walk away from a turd of an assignment. As a company of one, turds are still my responsibility, but I’ll procrastinate on them like the rest of us.
Playing is...play. It’s refreshing. It’s pretty hard to be anything but present when you’re a titan battling a titan half your size (meaning any punches thrown default to hitting you in a sensitive region).
After the kids go to bed and the chores are done, I head to the office for my fifteen minutes of journaling, and proceed to ruin my night.
Hundreds…or Thousands?
The problem isn’t that he caught me working on a day I said I wouldn’t.
It’s the revelation that when I’m working around them, I’m signaling that I’m off-limits.
And that’s a painful realization for two reasons. First, the signal that I was sending was both obviously the wrong one AND something I was completely oblivious to. That’s a blind spot that a drunk rapper could drive a semi-truck through. Not ideal.
The second was a math equation trying to answer a dark question: how many moments? How many for my four-year-old? My six-year-old? My two-year-old? My instincts know that I have to start counting in the hundreds. I’m starting to get really, really scared that I need to count in thousands.
How many times was I in the room but miles away?
How many times did they walk up, excited to show me something, only to see me typing, then turn and walk away, their bulbs dimming a little bit?
How many times did they say something cute or sweet or heartfelt that I missed because I was staring at my goddamn phone?
Such a waste.
And here’s the real problem: this is the concluding section of this newsletter. I do not have this figured out. It’s an open loop that’s eating away at me.
I thought I’d feel better writing about it. I don’t. I might actually feel worse.
I know the discipline of my Sacred Hours is important.
I know that raising a family while working a full-time job and building a side business is an impossible equation.
I know that I am a human trying my best, and that even an asshole like me deserves a little grace.
I know that everything worth having in life requires sacrifice.
But I need to get a hell of a lot better at figuring out what I’m paying before I pay it.
Because right now, I don’t want to look at my tab.