Was leaving a stable job while having kids the right decision?
Back in 2015, I cordially left my executive position of six years to return back to the startup grind with Fattmerchant. While in the end we have been able to achieve a lot of traction and success, I do get asked from time to time what caused me to decide to leave a stable position while having a wife and little ones to think about and not knowing at the time if it would be a good decision or a bad one. While never said out loud, the underlying question that was really on their minds was…
“What makes it acceptable to put your family’s welfare at risk?”
It never upsets me because it’s absolutely a fair question. I mean, I didn’t just leave a cushy job with a six figure salary, I also left to join a startup for less pay and more uncertainty about its financial future.
My wife and I mutually approve all decisions with major impacts to the family. Without her typical go-ahead this never would have happened. While it was awesome to have her understanding over the situation, there was still much more to consider.
My wife is an adult with a stable income of her own, but my children have many needs and more to come in the future. I may not always be around to help them make decisions but I can equip them for the best possible chance at success.
And so I quit because I believed there were lessons I could pass on, and the most powerful way to do so was through demonstration.
Choose your “work” family carefully.
They are not “like” your second family, they ARE your family but bonded in labor rather than blood. Choose a culture that resonates with you, not just one that fits your resume and pre-determined career path. Much like selecting a mate should be more than a compatible lifestyle and safe choice, selecting your work family should push you to be better and help you grow. After all, in all likelihood you will be spending roughly as much time with them as your own family over the next few years.
For me, I got to experience some of the culture with consulting projects before I came onboard full-time. If that wasn’t an option, I would have tried to ask about the likelihood of certain situations during the interview process and research vigorously by messaging past employees and reviews from Glassdoor.
Skills and knowledge can never be taken away.
Your job can be taken away from you and sometimes successes can turn into failures given enough bad luck or timing, but you always carry with you experiences and knowledge. This makes reflecting and learning about how to apply knowledge such an important part of the self development process and it also makes accumulating skills and knowledge the safest way to preserve your ability to be successful regardless of your capital situation or resources provided by your family.
Some of my colleagues and friends thought I was insane for stepping away from a lucrative job, title, and equity to start over, but I felt that stagnation was an even biggest risk. The new role would give me opportunities to challenge me in new and different ways.
There is no growth without some risk.
It is difficult to disprove the phrase, “no risk, no reward.” I never landed a job in which I didn’t take the interview and I have never learned a new skill without making some mistakes. The biggest problem as I see it, is the fatalistic perception of failure as the ultimate discouragement to undertaking life challenges.
Failure is not a binary outcome, it’s a scale tuned to the individual. On that scale, you will find everything from bad failure to good failure. Bad failures you never recover from, which is actually pretty hard to do. Good failures set you up for the future, show you your limits, and teach you lessons you can’t learn through any other means.
The biggest consequence of failing at this new startup was that I would have to get a day job. Big deal. The best outcome of a failure was that I would gain new insights to use at another attempt down the road.
Everyone believes in lots of things but conviction is what breeds unquestionable character.
One major difference you see between good people and great people is the adherence to their beliefs. This does not mean blindly following a crowd off the ledge of an iceberg, but sticking to something even in the face uncertainty.
People have expressed amazement in what our team and I have accomplished and the risks we took, but to me personally, all I did was believe in something enough to be resilient against the small stumbling blocks in the road.
Doing whatever it takes and swallowing pride.
If I had to be a full time developer again, I would have no problem to re-learn the latest technical skills. If I had to take the night shift tech support because paying the bills was an issue, I would do that too. And even if I had to work at McDonald’s, I would be master of the burger flip.
Pride causes a lot of problems by making you think you’re above everything else and not respecting people from different walks of life and the value of cumulative small opportunities. I once took a job on the business side that taught me just enough skills to do freelancing which taught me just enough entrepreneurial skills to do my next startup.
Wealth doesn’t define your success or your identity.
Jobs said it best when quipping that he never had any desire to be the richest man in the cemetery. Life isn’t about accumulation but about decisions. Sometimes those decisions can have varying outcomes, but your reaction to the situation defines your character more than the end result.
Once you’ve found a way to meet your living expenses, optimizing for wealth isn’t going to make you any happier. The decisions you make should be based on what you believe to be true to yourself.
You will be more regretful of the things you didn’t do, more than the things that you did.
While I try not to regret anything, you can’t help but wonder sometimes how things may have been different. The memories that really tend to stick with me were the lost opportunities or moments. Let’s make this clear, I’m not talking about drugs or alcohol, but dreams and ambitions. I think I would have liked being in law enforcement or building homes, at least for a little while. I also had ten years to write a book, but for today I’m happy getting out this blog post.
Do you agree or disagree? Please share your stories and thoughts in the comments, I would love to read them.
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Jacques Fu is a loving husband and father to two children, and has been a startup advisor, CTO/Co-founder @ Fattmerchant (fintech startup), CTO/Co-founder @ AssistRx (healthcare tech), and serial entrepreneur supporting the Orlando startup community.
I like to write about my experiences blending family life with startups.
Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquesfu
