If you were to take any time to watch me throughout my day, you would probably think that I am a typical family man. I average 40 hour work weeks. On the weekends, I spend a large amount of time with my family. We go to sport practices and play in the backyard. We go on bike rides together. I read them books every night before bed. I play Sorry, Battleship, Candyland, Stratego, and UNO with them. I take them sledding in the winter and camping in the summer. We make dinner a family meal every evening. I cherish the time I spend with my wife and kids. So it may come as a surprise that I consider my career as more important than my family.
Let me explain why.
To me, a career is not just a job. A job is simply the current employment opportunity for which someone is paid. Many jobs can make up a career. Then again, many jobs can just be many jobs, leading to no career. A career, on the other hand, is a long-term productive occupation that culminates in a central purpose in life. It is one’s life work. It is the ultimate source of value creation in a profession of one’s choosing. And because you choose it, it represents the profession you are most passionate about pursuing. It is something that motivates us to get up in the morning and challenges throughout the day.
Family, on the other hand, is where you celebrate our achievements and commiserate in our failures. It’s the place where we can share successes, support each other when floundering, and cling to in times of deep sadness. Family can provide the emotional fuel to keep going when the going gets tough. But there must be something going on outside of the family, some career, for there to be a need for this support (okay, I know some families that create more stress then help alleviate it, but let’s leave that aside). While family is not essential for success and happiness, it certainly makes success special by providing us a place to share our achievements.
In 2003, I decided after many months of introspection and research, that I wanted a career as an academic. I made this decision before I knew my wife or had children. Shortly after I met my soon to be wife, I informed her that my career path was going to take me far away from our hometown of St. Louis. The probability of finding a grad program, and later, an academic position in the St. Louis area were slim. However much I loved her and wanted to marry her, I did not and could not give up my dream. I was fully willing to manage a long distance relationship, if that was the our path, but I was certainly moving away. A month before I left for grad school, we were married and I was fortunate enough that she came with me. My career came first.
You might say “that is fine for you, but not for me.” So why do I say that your career should come first?
The primary reason is because happiness comes from value creation. You can hardly be happy, even if snuggled with the ones you love, if you’re in a mud hut, sick and starving, with no hope of improvement. It is likewise difficult to build enthusiasm for a job at McDonald’s as a fry cook. While earning money can in a meaningful sense buy happiness, as evidenced by studies showing a correlation between happiness and income up to $75,000, is it just the money? Perhaps, but think about the types of people who earn more than $75,000 per year. Most of them are in their mid to late careers. These people discovered a profession they love, worked hard at that profession, and established a career in that field. In the same study mentioned above, higher earning incomes did correlate with a deeper sense of achievement with life. Careers allow individuals to focus intensely on one specialty to develop ever greater values, achieving things that they could scarcely imagine in their 20s. It isn’t the money that’s creating the happiness, but the known value creation as evidenced by other people valuing your output by offering you larger sums of money.
Family, as wonderful as they are, cannot give you that deep sense of achievement. The reason – people have free will. So no matter how much time and effort you put into creating strong, healthy relationships, they are ultimately responsible for their own lives and their own achievements. They can choose to love you or reject you. They can choose to make the most out of their lives or choose not to. Even if you do everything right, it is their lives to live. Your sense of achievement in cultivating that relationship will always be mediated by that fact. No matter how awesome your kids, spouse, parents, or loved ones become because of your help, you can never claim their achievements for yourself.
Certainly, raising children can provide a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. Mine do. And many stay-at-home moms and dads can attest to the pleasures (and pains) in raising kids. We can share many joys and values within our loving relationships. And I am very proud to see my kids exhibiting the principles I’ve worked so hard to instill in them. But much of that pleasure comes from our shared creation of values, of small scale achievements, with people we love.
If you truly do make your family your highest value, you end up living your life for their sake, succumbing to the trappings of altruism. Why is altruism so dangerous? Consider a problem so prevalent, that it even has its own name – “Empty nest syndrome.” Wikipedia suggests that people “whose identity was based on being a parent” are susceptible to empty nest syndrome – resulting in depressions, loss of purpose, and feelings of rejection when children leave home to start out on their own. These people truly have made their family their highest value. When their kids grow up and out, parents can find themselves without that highest value, without a career, and without a clear sense of self. It doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way, as Ayn Rand so eloquently showed in Atlas Shrugged and The Virtue of Selfishness.
My wife and kids bring me an immense amount of joy. I would not give them up and would fight with all of my might to protect and care for them. My wife and to some extent my kids understand how I feel about them. They also understand how important my career is to me and do not ask me to give it up for their sake. I would certainly not ask them to do so for me. While there may be changes, delays, postponements, temporary set-backs, and even emergencies, pursuing our passions must come first. Our happiness depends on it.
I feel as though I’ve wasted time and energy focusing on my wife and two daughters. I want a house and a dog and a car in the driveway… My family, however, just seems to want an apartment and tight clothes and snack money. I feel as though my career is more important to me. My wife could have used my VA loan alone to purchase a home but she always has an excuse. What woman doesn’t want to own home for herself and her kids? I can see my business growing into something truly magnificent and I wish I could say the same for the rest of my family. Maybe they are all suffering from electra complexes where as my wife’s mother lived in the projects and so, she wishes to live in the projects… and my daughters, of course, want to be like their mom and become mediocre as well. I don’t want to be 40 years old in an apartment. My career gives me hope but it seems every time I seem to chip away at the obstacles I face, my wife starts a fight; or my daughter does something incredibly stupid like smoke pot or some idiotic shit like that, or worse! It’s like they remain these little kids that want my attention and don’t want me to have anything important besides them. Ungh… rambling on the internet 🙁 Now I feel stupid and depressed…
Such a person, who puts career before everything else, would likely eat clients for breakfast.
Loren, while there are undoubtedly people like that, consider how long a career would last if someone truly did eat their clients for breakfast. Certainly, short lived. Such a person would destroy what they call a career by living by that standard. Hardly conducive for success. If instead they acted rationally, they might observe that building mutually beneficial relationships with clients is far better for long term success and hence act on trying to build those relationships. The same goes for family.
Timing and life stage are important factors in the validity of your claims. As objective as you may want to be perceived, your piece is still very much a subjective piece because of your stipulations of success, achievement, and happiness. Many people do not have the right reason to have a family which must include a commitment and sense of duty towards the lives brought into this world. People have families for the wrong reason and those eventually find themselves telling others “work before family.” Once children are involved, it is a point of no return. Family to me has always come a little ahead of career and work because in the end, who is left is them. If I were laid off or lost my job, my family would still be there. In my old age, weak and sick, it is family who will be there with love provided I had sown my seeds with love. Telling my children my career is before them and continuing this idea throughout life is unwise in the end. It only raises a selfish, cold humanity. The solution is work-life balance. It doesn’t have to be a 50-50 split and should be flexibly handled.
I see your point. Having a career you can throw yourself into creates a sense of success, and it can make you happy, but that’s temporary. What I’m getting from this is that making money and holding a successful career is a “central purpose” of life. While having a good career is enjoyable, and obviously monetarily beneficial, living a life where one of your “central purposes” is to be successful in a career, seems depressingly dreadful to me. I’m not saying a career isn’t important. I fully support being successful and holding a great career that you love. However, I think that as a whole, society continues to screw up their priorities. Careers have become increasingly more “important” than the family. The family is what raises you, what teaches you moral values, what trains you to go out into the world. Throw it back to the early days of America. Immigrants left their homes overseas. They left their careers, their homes, their lives. Why? To come to America and create a whole new world of opportunities for their families. While career opportunities did play into that, the first immigrants didn’t come to get amazing careers. They came to escape persecution, and to find a better home for their families. A lot of them started out in extreme poverty here, and yet, people still managed to find happiness living in the dumps. They had their families, they had their freedom, they had opportunities. What happens when you lose your job? Or when something goes terribly wrong with that business you’re in? What have you got left? Your family. Your family is meant to support you. To be there for you. And again, while I see the reasoning behind “career first, family second,” that’s not how it should be.
Dont be hypocrite and tell me that you dont need money to made a happy family.. for man you need to put your career first and the same time dont left your family behind. Wife put their effort to rise the children… husband help and provide. Man put their effort to develop the career …and wife need to help and support. Both husband and wife need to cooperate to build a happy family. Employer always need the good worker that put the job first… not the family first… sorry to say that. Of course at the same time do not left your family behind.
I feel that our own individual happiness is the number one priority of life. The whole meaning of life is happiness. Happiness comes from within and from freedom to let oneself do what makes them happy(wheyher it is career, family, sports, or the arts).
Also, someone said earlier career is temporary. Well, so is family. So is life. The best family in your life is you and anyone who shares your values(and NOT necessarily your DNA!). I don’t have family of my own at all. I’m 33 and there is no obligation nor law that says one has to devote oneself to anyone else specific. Family should be those people who energize you and support you, not those who depend on you(except babies and pets) . But the ones who have to depend on you(babies and pets) – they do require you to have an income enough to cover the caring for them ( home, water, food, training, education, extra free time to talk, play, to save for vacations and for housing and for retirement to avoid burdening them later. ..and on and on) . that requires a career or a job at the very least. If you want a quality life and a quality family time, then you need that level of income to provide. Without that income, you better be on your own, which is my case, unless you don’t care for the quality of life. If you care for the quantity of lives, then , even with low income, you just need to breed like roaches and risk staying homeless for retirement hoping that one of your offspring would take care of you. ….I sense that a job or one’s own business or career is what gives us freedom and choices. Family, in a sense of marriage, does not give any freedom because on a legal side of marriage laws, there are bunch of obligations and complications. Family in a sense of love and shared values provides a sense of freedom. Freedom is important for happiness and happiness is the most important thing in life. Freedom to make choices and decisions is what makes us grow up and become 100% authentic oneself. And that freedom comes with certain income and not family. If you have a baby, you can’t choose where to live. But if you have income, you can budget and decide how much you need to save to be able to live, and where to live, and whether to have a baby or not – that’s a lot of choices! The more choices one has, the more freedom and the more happiness one has. And it all comes with money. The more money, the more choices. But money itself cost time, which is temporary. So, it’s always a balancing game between one’s lifetime paid to earn money and one’s money paid to have a life of choices(or freedom).