Welcome to the Prism: parenting, career chaos, and finding clarity
The Story
Last Friday I was two minutes into an all hands meeting, camera on, doing my best impression of a person who has it together, when my almost three year old wandered into frame holding a dry erase marker and asked, “What you doing daddy?” I was thankfully muted. I laughed silently for a solid ten seconds. Then I went back to the meeting as if she wasn’t hovering inches away waiting for the clock to strike 6PM.
That’s the job now, isn’t it? Work in one window, dad negotiating marker privileges in the next, sometimes inside the same sixty seconds. I used to think that meant I was failing at both. Turns out I was just looking at one light through two different lenses at once.
The Big Idea
Here’s the idea I keep coming back to: one experience, raising kids while running something, refracts into a spectrum of realities. It isn’t black and white. It isn’t either/or. It’s a prism.
Nobody built the infrastructure for this. Career systems assume you have one focus. Parenting systems assume the same. So when you’re doing both at once, it feels like failure, because you’re measuring yourself against rules written for someone who only had to show up as one thing at a time.
You don’t need to balance work and parenting. Balance implies a steady 50/50 split, and nothing about this life holds steady for more than a day. What you actually need is rotation. Some weeks, work gets the priority. Some weeks, it’s parenting. Both are valid, and neither one makes you a fraud in the other room.
This is where business thinking earns its keep. Delegation, boundaries, saying no on purpose instead of by accident, these aren’t office skills you leave at the door when you pick up your kid. They’re the same muscle, used in a different room. You already know how to do this at work. This newsletter is about using it at home too.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the one running the company, managing the team, or just trying to survive a demanding job with a toddler attached to your leg. The prism applies whether you’re a founder, a manager, or someone quietly holding a career together in the background. The rules assumed you’d pick one identity and stay there. You didn’t, and you’re not going to. That’s not a flaw in you. It’s a flaw in the rules.
Clarity isn’t having it all figured out. It’s knowing why you’re making the choice you’re making this week, and owning it without paying a guilt tax on top.
Try This Week
The ask: Spend 10 minutes tonight writing your top 3 priorities for this week. Not your to-do list. Your actual priorities.
Why it works: Your calendar reveals what you’re really protecting. Your to-do list just reveals what’s loudest.
The setup:
- Grab a notepad, not an app. A little friction is the point.
- Write 3 things that matter most this week: work, a kid, your health, your partner, you.
- For each one, write a single specific action, not the whole category.
- Everything else is secondary this week. Notice what you’re quietly saying “not yet” to.
When to measure: By Sunday, check your actual calendar against the list. If they don’t match, you’ve found your first refraction. That’s useful information, not a failure.
Reader Mailbag
The question: “I feel like I’m not good at either job right now, work or parenting, because I’m always split between them. How do you stay sane?”
The answer: That split feeling is the refraction doing its thing, not proof you’re bad at either one. You’re building a third skill nobody names for you: integration. It takes longer to get good at than either job alone, so give yourself the runway. The fact that you’re even asking this question means you’re already showing up more intentionally than most people managing the same split. Start smaller than you think you need to. Try the Priority Audit above this week and see what actually rises to the top.
Got a curveball like this? Reply to this email. I read every one.
P.S.
Fun fact: “prism” comes from the Greek for “thing that is sawed.” It’s built to split light so it can refract. Your week isn’t broken. It’s just doing what it’s designed to do. Next week: toddler management tactics stolen straight from CEOs.
You’re not alone, and you’re doing better than you think.
The Parenting Prism