Fatherhood

Today marks one year of me becoming a father. Here’s my retrospective on my journey so far.

Regarding preparation, honestly, other than an antenatal class I attended, I didn’t really study that much about parenting before my daughter was born. No books, no YouTube videos. Apart from the typical sleepless nights, I didn’t know what to expect. I just winged it. When a trivial problem comes along, my evolutionary natural instinct just kicks in. If it’s non-trivial, I search it up.

The moment my daughter was born and I saw her, my only feeling at that time was "damn, it’s alive, it’s real, that helpless thing right there, is half me". It didn’t feel like meeting a new person because that person is part of me. It’s a weird, surreal feeling. The other thing that went through my mind was: how do I keep her alive and nurture her for the next 20 years.

Parenting is time-consuming. There’s no doubt about it. One of my worries about having kids was that they'd make me less productive. I love building stuff. I spent a huge amount of time on work. So logically having kids means I’ll have less time for that.

One solution most ambitious parents turn to is delegating the parenting away. This includes shipping them off to someone else, hiring maids, or arguably boarding schools (this one's debatable, since it may help with networking). Personally, I’m not a fan of this. I don’t believe a little quality time makes up for all the time not spent. I want to be there for the ordinary days, not just the weekends and vacations.

I had this conversation with Zethy the other day where we concluded that the time we get with our children is short in the grand scheme of things, and therefore priceless. Picture this: say you live to 80. Your first 20 years is shared with your parents. And you’ll have the same 20 years shared with your children before they move out of the nest and get on with their own life. After that, it's mostly you and your partner. Only a quarter of your life is shared with your children.

To make matters worse, the prime of most people’s career happens to coincide with their children’s formative years. That sucks.

I don’t have a silver bullet to this problem, but my strategy is pretty simple - reduce wasting time and automation. That includes multitasking even when I’m not a good multitasker. For example, instead of just watching Netflix, I watch Netflix while folding my laundry. And ever since the advent of Claude Opus 4.6, a lot of my ideas can now be executed quickly, often without me in the loop. Theoretically that time saved can now go towards my daughter. I also have plans on automating other mundane things in the house with AI agents like Hermes but I have yet to try it.

In other words, instead of delegating the parenting part, delegate everything else. Does it take the joy away from building things? That's a story for another day. But in short, if Thomas Edison had the idea of building a lightbulb, I think he'd care more about the end result than about going through a thousand failed attempts.

There are times that I just feel tired and need my me time and that's okay. I take a break from it, graciously hand it off to my wife, do some work or play a few rounds of competitive Overwatch (currently Emerald woohoo), and get back to my daughter feeling refreshed.

If ambition is something I define myself and supposed to be hard, then why not redefine my ambition to be both being a great dad as well as building great things.