Repairing Damage in Retirement

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them: work, family, health, friends, and spirit.

…and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four balls — family, health, friends and spirit — are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered.

They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.

— Brian Dyson, former CEO of Coca Cola at the 1991 Georgia Tech Commencement 

The above extract from this commencement speech has been quoted (and misquoted) many times over the years. The original archived text from the September 30, 1991 edition of The Whistle, Georgia Tech’s faculty newspaper is linked here (see page 3).

I personally heard this kind of advice about balance similar to “juggling the 5 balls of life” many times throughout my working life, and I wasn’t that great at following any of it. For background, I spent most of my career as an executive of different early stage startup tech companies that achieved various levels of success. Two that I joined early became profitable and did IPOs. Several others were ultimately acquired. One of them sucked. If they say that startup years are like dog years, I’ve juggled with that rubber ball of work for hundreds of years.

Much of the last six years of retirement has been spent working to repair the damage to the family, health, friends, and spirit glass balls caused by dropping them during those tech startup years.

Why am I writing about this?

For a bit of background, I received a message from a friend (and reader) to write about relationships and the typical advice that others give. Here is what he wrote:

One post I’d like to see is on balancing the many jobs you have as a dad, husband, son, and startup exec. 

Our biggest struggle right now is we often feel our role as husband/wife is often the lowest priority. And it feels like we’re partners in a joint venture more than we are husband/wife. I read your mention of gray divorce, we’re certainly not at that point, but the stresses of both parents working full time gigs is real. 

We recently did two weeks in the French Riviera and Lake Como (no kid) which was wonderful and helped us reset. It also allowed us to have some SOTUs [State of the Unions] and evaluate our marriage and what could be better. One thing I’ve realized is how much our combined stresses between parenting and work the last year has resulted in us sometimes showing the worst of ourselves. 

And when I say balance, it’s specifically the balance of time and emotional energy that I’m most curious about. 

And I’ve heard the usual advice of:

- you have to evaluate what is most important to you
- you have to choose to make time for the most important things
- assume positive intent and be intentional about overcommunicating
- have more sex
- etc etc

I don’t find any of it particularly helpful, and candidly a bit insulting, as if those obvious things are somehow groundbreaking revelations. 

Personally, reading this question brought up so many emotions. My first reaction was “I feel you, brother.”

There is a lot here. I personally believe that balancing roles in marriage, family, and family-of-origin (son) is tough enough for everyone without adding in a career. In our thirties, our marriage counselor told us that the two biggest areas of conflict among young couples are about money and families. We didn’t have issues surrounding money, but the reason families can be the source of conflict is that both parties in a relationship have decades of life prior to the relationship that they still need to unpack. Even though my wife, Marsha, and I have known each other since we were kids, we had a set of individual experiences that shaped us in ways that we’re still working through even in our late 50’s!

Now let’s put the element of one partner being a startup tech exec on top of that, there’s a whole other layer of challenges because of the mental, physical, and emotional demands of the career choice. Marsha said more than once in our relationship “I wish I worked in your group at work.” because my limited time, energy and bandwidth was about investing in the group of people that trusted their own financial and career well-being in me. My wife would tell you that I worked a lot, I worked hard and I was dedicated. She absolutely encouraged and would say, “I appreciate that you lead from the front. It is important for the people that work for you.” But I don’t think either of us at the time were connecting the dots. We were both neck deep in our “own” careers.

This phenomenon may be true of other career choices, but I called my Substack “Retired Techie…” because life as a startup tech exec was my personal vantage point.

There’s a lot to cover here, so I thought I’d break this answer up into two different parts.

• The “doing” - i.e., how to balance the multiple roles as dad, husband son, and startup tech exec

• The “feeling” - i.e., feeling more than husband/wife than partners in a joint venture.

In this post, I’ll share some of my thoughts on the “doing”, and next week (and beyond), I’ll cover some of my thoughts on the “feeling.”

Damaging the glass balls

So, when people ask me how I did with the glass balls, I’d basically say “not so great during my life as a startup tech exec, but I’m working on it now.”

On the “doing” side, I did a lot of things that I reflect on:

• Skipped dinners with family to work late almost every night

• Reliably entertained out-of-town colleagues who came in, exhausting my “social battery” and inflating my desire to stay at home during family time

• Spent much of my time at home isolated to recover from just too much interaction at the office

• Let my burnout create many “regrettable” moments in my interactions with Marsha and the kids

• Delegated almost everything around the house and family to Marsha

• Minimized interactions with my family-of-origin

• Relied on my in-laws to pick up a lot of the slack in supporting Marsha

This isn’t to say that there wasn't also a lot of positive “doing.” As a family, we had some great times at home playing games. (Rock Band is the best family video game ever!) And we still love to play games like Cribbage and Durak with our adult daughters, both when together and online. We traveled well together on pretty drama-free family vacations when they were kids, and we still do that today with our adult daughters, having just gotten back from a trip to Japan together. We built some great traditions as a family about how we support each other, and this just wasn’t about going to all the music recitals, athletic events, and other activities, but also some really good discussions about how we support each other in future endeavors. I still enjoy the work my daughters do, and I thoroughly enjoyed last night reading an academic paper my younger daughter wrote in the past year while she was a Master’s student at University College London.

As a couple, one of the most positive things for me about being an empty nester is having the most fun playmate to enjoy the experiences with. Marsha and I started as friends, and we have fun on all the “doing” stuff we do together, whether it’s exercising together, going out, or even just hanging out and talking. Over the years, we’ve done a great job building a set of common experiences together that we can laugh, cry and reflect on. On the positive side of “doing”, we nail the “roommate stuff.” (Again, we’ll cover the work we’re doing on “feeling” next week!)

On the “doing" side, Marsha has a great expression, which I’ll repeat here.

It’s not about quality time. It’s about quantity time.

This topic is probably worth its own Substack post, but the net here is that we just can’t manufacture the best times to share our lives. Life just happens organically at its own pace. Quality time happens during quantity time.

In the end, I think my personality and values combined with my upbringing along with a wife of similar personality and values and upbringing allowed me to lean in and focus my energy on my career. There wasn’t enough quantity time.

Isn’t the answer obvious?

For those who follow the “general wisdom” about productivity, the obvious answer to “doing” anything that is important but not urgent (like family time) is just to “decide” to do it. (I’ll do a future post covering the Eisenhower Matrix that outlines what people should theoretically “do now”, “delegate”, “delete” and “decide” on.) 

After all, why not “decide” to put on my calendar the dinners with family, set clear boundaries for work hours, establish limits on travel, and meditate to feel more balanced before interacting with family to “enjoy the bliss of the present.” These are all the obvious next steps, right?

I don’t think so. The more obvious next step, in my opinion, is to choose a different career. From my perspective, a “startup tech exec” could simply be a poor career choice for those seeking balance. Let’s break down the term.

• Startup is a hard place to be because the journey to product-market fit is a hard one. After all, if product-market fit were already clear, a bigger, more well-resourced company or set of companies would already dominate the market. As such, the only way to really succeed is to do something innovative that no one has done before or in a way no one has done it before. There’s also the requirement, once finding this fit, to execute faster than any bigger or well-resourced company. This is why most startups fail.
  

• Tech is an interesting field because by its very nature, things change all the time and at an accelerating pace. Anyone who does tech for a long time has to constantly learn new things. Even outside of work, I’d spend time doing “fun” geek projects to stay relevant.  And that takes work. If one is trying to spend less time at work and work-related things and to spend more time with family, there are likely better fields to be in.
  

• Exec, or executive, is a different role within tech because this is the role relied on to find, lead, and execute the right strategy. In many ways, it’s the worst place to be. Above the executive, an investor can rely on executives across multiple companies to have success within a portfolio. Below the executive, objectives are set within a strategy and the success criteria are clear. An engineer can have a successful GitHub project, even if the company fails. A marketer can write a viral Medium post, even if the company fails. There is no such thing as a successful executive when the company fails.

So, the obvious logical advice I’d have for someone who wants to balance their life is probably not to be a startup tech exec. Here are some different angles for possibly getting better balance:

• Be a tech exec and relieve pressure by not doing a startup. In a larger company, it may be possible to create organizational redundancies.

• Be a startup exec and relieve pressure by not doing tech. In an industry that doesn’t change so rapidly, it may be able to slow down the pace of change.

• Be a startup tech person and relieve pressure by not being an exec. Non-executive manager or individual contributor roles can participate in innovation and upside without needing to be neck-on-line for the success of the company.

By definition, the person that wants to be a startup tech exec is already not taking logical advice. On paper, the risk-reward is generally not worth it for anyone seeking balance. While the rewards of being a startup tech exec can be good if the company is successful, most don’t succeed, and it requires lots of luck, learning, and labor. The logical advice for balance would be to reduce the requirement in one of these dimensions.

So why did I do it?

For me, I got into this startup world, and, once getting there, I had a desire to do a good job. This was true as a student, it was true as a career person, and it’s what I’m even trying to do as a retired person.

The issue here is that I personally believe if someone wants to do a good job, that person can do a really good job at one thing.

• If the one thing is career, the answer is to devote the energy to career.

• If the one thing is family, the answer is to devote the energy to family.

• If the one thing is balance, the answer is to reflect on your core values and understand that both career and family have heavy requirements on time and energy. Career and family are grabbing from the same bucket and how you empty the bucket will require negotiation not only with yourself but with your family. Perhaps it means not taking a job as a startup tech exec which has so many demands.

I believe that Marsha and I were good partners because we both had a compatibility of focus on “one thing” that complemented each other. I made the one thing career, and she made the one thing family, and I think this made us very successful partners in “doing” part of the joint venture.  (Again, more on the “feeling” later!)

Unique to our situation was that Marsha and I both had immigrant parents but very different experiences. My dad was an entrepreneur and worked all the time. I was used to not having dinner with my dad. Marsha’s dad worked for a large Fortune 500 company and was reliably home for dinner every night. Marsha’s mom was the homemaker extraordinaire, Marsha grew up in an environment where her mom played a very important support role to the family. Marsha was familiar with that role when it came to our family. 

I know every situation is different. I was lucky to have so much support from Marsha, my family of origin, and my in-laws to pursue the career as I saw fit. I was lucky that Marsha is such a loving wife and mother. I fully recognize that not everyone is as lucky as I am.

Where does that leave us?

Everyone’s situation is unique, and I can only speak from my own experience.

The high demands of a startup tech exec who wants to do a good job are real.

This creates a situation where there are demands on hours, background thoughts making the individual less “present” with others, and emotions that lead to “regrettable moments.”

In the end, always do the best that you can. Express gratitude for all the big and small ways that you have received support and also try to give support to others both in both big and small ways. And in the same way you would ask of others to give you grace, give yourself grace. Nobody is perfect. 

To my friend who asked this question, the fact that you have the awareness about the challenges you are facing so early on is half the battle. I think a lot of gray divorce is really about not disrupting unhealthy habits earlier in the marriage and replacing them with healthier relationship habits. It takes commitment, practice and continual adjustment. One of my favorite sayings is “what works in Act I doesn’t always work in Act II.” In my case, the things that worked for us earlier in our marriage needed to change as the years passed.

Back to the glass balls

This leads me back to the “juggling the 5 balls of life” from Brian Dyson’s Georgia Tech Commencement speech. I mentioned how my “one thing” is retirement now. This is what it looks like for me.

Work was the rubber ball, and I made the decision to set aside the notion of being a startup tech exec.  This is why I retired at 51.

Family was a damaged glass ball, and my wife and daughters have been really supportive to make the investments to take a mental health journey together. More on this later!

Health was a damaged glass ball, and my retirement journey started with a reset at a fasting clinic, starting by writing a health blog, and now sharing my experiences with more modern treatments.

Friends, while not a damaged glass ball, could have used improvement, I had a running group of former co-workers that met every Sunday morning. A writer for Fatherly magazine even wrote about it here. Currently, this has  been a major focus area for me, and I intend to use this space to discuss my observations about the friendship recession we are in. For a quick review, I did a little one minute YouTube video for a friend’s channel on this topic.

Spirit is something that I’ve always felt inside, and now I’m looking for more ways to give of myself in ways unique to me. This is why I started this Substack. 

Thank you for taking this journey with me.