Matthieu asks:

Since you do a lot of things (investor, dad, owner of a "small" business, blog writer) I was wondering what you don't do to keep up with this level of commitment. In the same line, it often said that behind one person success, there's a wife/husband that helps to manage those others things.

First, as a broad, abstract answer I point people to Two Big Things, which I’ve found to be broadly Correct:

Some people try to “have it all.” Men and women both. But it’s never true. At most two can function well; the rest do not. More often, there’s just one that receives the majority of the energy, and the rest suffers.

The personal answer I give is going to be out-of-date: the truth is, I’ve experienced fatherhood for around five months and I’ve experienced “fatherhood while trying to also ‘do work’” for less than half that time, and I don’t think any in medias res description is going to be accurate, let alone useful. (If I were to try to put it into words right now, it’d probably be something like: I’m up for eighteen hours a day, six of those are spent on Lucy duty, eight of those are spent on Work, two of those are spent on keeping the house and family in order, one of them is spent lifting, and one is spent on Telemachus.)

The pre-Lucy answer is probably more useful, even if its now firmly entrenched in the past. When Haley and I talked about what my life as an independent technologist would look like, we settled on some ground rules, unimpeachable clauses in my contract not just as a husband and “person who wasn’t an absolute shit to live with”: to have dinner together every night, to take good care of myself (sleep well, eat healthy, work out every day, stay hydrated and sun-touched), to not lose sight of my own luck and providence. Those things were — and are — my topsoil. Everything else is labor — labor by choice, but hard work nonetheless.

A lot goes by the wayside! I am a terrible friend and correspondent these days; I love television and film but saw maybe a dozen movies total this year and only watch what Haley and I can consume during dinner (which in 2024 was all seventeen series of Taskmaster); I travel and experiment and hobby less than I otherwise would.

And exchange, agency: an infinitely flexible schedule (though we define flexibility here to mean “can take off a random day for no reason and go for a lovely walk through Maymont” more than “can throw phone into the ocean for a week and know that the rest of the team will fill in the gaps”); work that even on its most menial days I take full pride and equity.

I would be mortified if you read this (or, indeed, any of my writing) as a paean to Grindset.

I'm proud of what I've built, and the sacrifices it took to build it; I'm grateful for the life it's let me stumble into living, and would happily make the same choices again — knowing now with certainty where they would lead me.

But doing This Kind Of Thing means being in worse shape than I'd like to be, and spending less time with my friends than they deserve. These are reasonable (and temporary) choices, but they are choices nonetheless, and anyone who intimates that sufficiently divine levels of energy and discipline will exculpate you from making them is either a fool or a liar with something to sell.