Being a Parent
Boosted My Career

What I learned in my 8-month parental leave

April 2023

Before having a child, I always thought raising kids was highly time-consuming and would inevitably harm my professional development. However, after the birth of my first child, my thoughts changed completely. Raising kids would push my career to a new level, which would be hard to reach otherwise.

What happened?

My employer allows me to take an 18-week parental leave. I decided to use all of it. Otherwise, I would go against the corporate culture for work-life balance and pressure my peers not to use all of their parental leaves.

However, I did not want to leave my projects unmaintained for 18 weeks, which may harm their popularity in the open-source community, so I worked in a one-week-on-one-off manner for 36 weeks.

Before having a child

In my early career, I worked hard because I was so eager to be a good software engineer. It was a mixed feeling of anger and hunger.

I was angry at everything that slowed me down. I am not too fond of any busy work unrelated to my career, even including the courses I took at the university. I was angry about not having the resources to match my ambition. For example, I could not afford to eat near the office but had to spend time cooking. For another example, I could not afford a car to stay in the office and work as late as I wanted without worrying about not catching the last shuttle.

I drive myself with anger to work harder. I resonated with the movie The Prestige by Christopher Nolans so much. I used to believe that the success of one's career is about making sacrifices. Make the most significant sacrifice and achieve the most enormous success. So I made sacrifices, like working in the office on weekends and having no vacations. I would push myself even more when I did not meet my expectations.

Such an attitude pushed me to where I am today, a professional software engineer on a crucial team at one of the best tech companies in the world. If this was the end goal of my endeavor, my attitude was perfect. It helped me achieve my career goals entirely. However, can I do better?

Anger is not the best motivation

According to many religions. Fear and love are the two opposite ends of emotions. All other emotions are derived from these two. For example, anger is fear announced.

According to many self-improvement authors, love is a much better motivation than fear in achieving one's career goal. Here is my understanding. To achieve my most ambitious career goal, I have to believe that I will achieve it. However, I should not feel angry if I really believe it because the root of the anger is that I still think there is a possibility to fail. Therefore, anger is the exact opposite of believing one could succeed.

On the other hand, love removes the anger or fear by removing the expectation. With love, instead of worrying about a distant goal, I can focus on what I am doing since I love it. I no longer need to overthink about the ambitious goal. I only need to enjoy and focus on what I do. And that is exactly what is required to achieve the ultimate goal.

Love leads the way forward

Anger could serve as a good motivation in the early stages of career development, but love is especially effective for my path forward. I summarize my career development into three stages: the 0-sum competition, playing the game, and creating value.

The 0-sum competition typically happens in school and university applications and first-time job hunting. There are a fixed number of openings. No matter how hard everyone works, it would not increase the total number of admissions. So, the competition in this stage is 0-sum.

By landing one's first job, one could start to play a new game. The game rules are still clear. It could be the promotion criteria or making more impact in the research community if you are doing a doctoral degree. The method could be much more flexible than the previous stage, which is no longer exam-and-score-based. You can use whatever method you can think of, as long as it does not violate the game rules, to achieve your goal.

The creating value stage starts when it no longer works when I try to play the game. I had to change my goal to create value, like making the customers happier or doing really difficult and useful research. Benefit the entire mankind if I can. In the previous stage, creating value was one of the many methods used to achieve the goal, but now it is the goal itself. Creating value is at the root of the driving force of one's career development. Everything else, like promotion or impact, would follow up.

Looking at the three stages, the first two have clear goals and require dedication. Being angry about everything and pushing myself helped me pass these two stages.

The last stage is largely an art. To be a world-class professional, I must stay creative. I have to enjoy my work, be passionate about what I do, and believe in a bright future.

A goal-driven approach could also work. It provides some motivation. However, a love-driven approach works better. It not only provides motivation but also inspires creativity.

So, maybe it is time for me to finally evolve from fear-driven to love-driven in my career.

After having a child

After the birth of my first child, I felt so happy to take some time off and take care of the child. I am so happy that I even question whether I deserve such a happy life. Moreover, there have been some unexpected changes in my lifestyle.

My life became so much simpler as I disconnected from the internet. Parenting is such a demanding job that I do not have time to check my phone. So, I just stopped checking my phone completely unless necessary. I even bought a wrist watch just to avoid checking my phone for time.

It shifted my focus from what happens on the news or in others' lives to my own life. I now have much more time to contemplate and talk with myself.

This digital well-being finally leads to good sleep. Many people nowadays cannot fall asleep early at night, partially because of the emotional stimulations from the internet during the day, not to mention people may also check social media before bed. By being peaceful during the day, I finally managed to fall asleep and get up early, something I had always wanted to do but could not ever do since high school. The regular sleep cycle also replenishes my energy for parenting and work.

All these changes, focusing on parenting, ignoring the noise on the internet, and getting good sleep, helped me reach my inner peace. I am so grateful that I can enjoy such a happy life. I bring this gratefulness to work, which helps me enjoy working.

It would take some time to see the real effect, but it is helping my career in the long run.

Another me in a parallel universe

I sometimes imagine there is another me in a parallel universe who always put work as the highest priority and sacrificed everything he could to get a better career, including having kids.

He made the sacrifice and deserved a better career. He did have a successful career, but he always felt dissatisfied. Although he knew not all efforts could be paid off, he was still angry for not being more successful given his big sacrifice.

Such a feeling of not getting enough reduced his happiness in his work, which prevented him from creating the masterpieces he should have created. He is a professional but was far from the top professionals making significant contributions to the world.

Conclusions

To become a world-class professional, I need creativity and focus, which can only be achieved by leading a happy life. Being angry and hungry led me to where I am today, but it would not lead me to where I want to be. However, love does.