The Title Was Never the Whole Point

For a long time, a better job meant a chance to make life more stable for my family. I wanted to earn more. I wanted more responsibility. I wanted my children to have opportunities I hadn’t had. Those were real reasons for pursuing advancement, and I don’t look back on them as if I was concerned with the wrong things.

There was a time when managing a fast-food restaurant was the highest position I thought I could reach without a college degree. Later, I became an Assistant Vice President and Operations Manager. That progress mattered to me. It changed what I could provide and what I understood to be possible for myself.

But I had put a lot of expectations on what success would do for me. I could improve my circumstances and still carry the same self-doubt. I could have more responsibility at work and still have things to learn about how I handled my emotions or showed up for my family. Reaching a position didn’t settle all of that.

When my son was born, I thought about my own childhood and the relationship I had wanted with my father. I questioned whether I knew how to be the kind of father my son needed. I wanted him to feel secure. I wanted him to know I was there. Providing for him became a major part of how I understood my responsibility.

There were periods when that meant working two jobs. There were also job losses, a relocation, and a period of driving rideshare while looking for something more stable. My wife and I were making decisions that affected our household, not just my career. When I talk about the positions I eventually reached, those experiences are part of what they meant to me.

I also had to understand that providing didn’t cover everything I wanted to give my children. I wanted them to be able to talk to me. I wanted them to know their feelings mattered and that they could ask for guidance. I knew what it felt like to need something from a parent that I didn’t know how to get.

That required me to look at myself beyond what I was accomplishing. I could point to the work I was doing for my family, but I also needed to consider how they experienced me. Was I giving them room to be heard? Was I helping them understand something, or assuming they should already know? Those questions asked something different of me than a performance goal did.

I don’t see that as a reason to dismiss career ambition. Financial security mattered in my life, and it still does. I know what a lack of it can do to a household. I just came to understand that I could make progress in one part of my life while still needing to do work in another.

Writing the books is connected to that understanding. There were things I learned through experience that I wish I had understood earlier. Some were personal. Others were about how organizations worked and why doing a good job didn’t always produce the outcome I expected. Putting those experiences into words gave me a way to make them available to someone else.

I don’t have to make my path look straighter than it was for it to be useful. I can explain what I misunderstood, what changed, and what I still had to work through after my circumstances improved.

I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished professionally. I also want my children to know more about me than what I did for work. The stability I worked toward was supposed to support a life with them. That means paying attention to the life we’re having, even while I’m working on what comes next.