My friend is a working mom who is constantly bombarded by the guilt of not being able to spend more time with her daughter and the disappointment that she’s yet launched something big, something entrepreneurial, something that makes an impact to the world.
“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion
Having worked with many startups makes her even more impatient and frustrated. It intensifies her struggle to have it all – passion, families, money, and a financial safety net.
But she just has to accept the reality that time is limited. As a venturist, as an executive, as a dreamer, especially as a mother, you need to set priorities. Click To Tweet
She set priorities for work milestones, for product roadmaps, for marketing campaigns but for the biggest project of her life, i.e. HER LIFE, she naively fantasised that she could have all things in one go!
So I took out a leaf chart and mark down all the goals that she wants to achieve, narrowing down to 3 to 5 goals that are utterly important and worthy of her time.
Step 1 Passion v.s. Time Priorities Chart
In a perfect world, she will be working on:
- World-changing project(s) that are making positive impact to many people’s lives;
- Spending a lot of time with her families;
- Making “enough” money (and feeling very fulfilled) from business ventures;
- Having financial freedom and the sense of assurance that everything will be financially taken care of.
And to line them up with the size of the “leaf” representing her amount of passion towards this priority and the “%” representing the amount of time she spends on each item at the moment.
This gives her a clear picture of what she is at now.
The goal is for her is to ultimately align the proportion of passion (size of the leaf) and time spent on it (% contribution).
Step 2 Planning – Returns over Hours on Priorities Radar Chart
Priorities change over different stages of life but she doesn’t plan on giving up her dream altogether. You just have to be patient and taking things one step at a time. Click To TweetSo I map out different scenarios based on her different life events and what her key decisions will be at respective stages (to eliminate all variables and single out “time” as the only constraint without any dependencies on other factors, assumption is made that one can always get what she sets her heart to do so as).
For this, I am using a Radar Chart to help to sort her thoughts.
The series of charts is to help her make decision by weighing different gives and takes.
Stage 1 – The Phase of Discontent (2016/17)
Constant juggling between her day job, building a good upbringing platform for her daughter, trying to initiate side projects that would ultimately lead her to her own ventures. Then led her to the point of complete exhaustion, edge of depression and being worried that there is no way she can handle everything if she is going to have a second kid.
Her decision: loosen up on her pressure to launch any serious entrepreneurial ventures but treat all the side projects as learning opportunities to prepare herself for later stages. She will need the time to “repair” herself if she really wants to have another kid.
Stage 2 – Preparing for the second kid (2017)
Be realistic, if she is going to be pregnant again, that is pretty much the only thing that she will have time for. So she will have to settle with not being able to do much more other than performing at her job. This is also a good time for her to strengthen the bonding with her children.
Stage 3 – Deciding on her career path (2018/19)
Now it gets interesting. She will need to decide whether she wants to aim at a higher paying job (and presumably with a much more esteemed job title with a big name company) or spend more time to develop her entrepreneurial path but probably a much lower initial ROI on time invested. The decision is that with a higher paying job, there will be a ceiling for her returns at being proportional to her time investment. Although logically it means a bigger safety net (but who knows what is going to happen in this age of unpredictability when HSBC’s stock price is significantly lower than that of Apple and Google), it also means that she is trapped and stuck deeper in the rat race.
It is a very tough decision to make because theoretically, a higher paying job will help her save more money to build a safety net reserve in case she still wants to go solo and pursue a venture say after 3 years in that position. But realistically, will she still want to take the difficult route to build everything from scratch if she is already earning way more than she can from her ventures?
“The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.”
― Yves Saint-Laurent
I see there are two controlling factors here: 1. The lucrativeness of the upside gains and 2. more importantly, could she then figure out the one single most venture she want to start, one project that she believes in so much that she could go all in.
Like many aspiring entrepreneurs, at the moment she knows where her passion lies but I am not convinced that she knows exactly WHAT steps to make WHAT happen. Click To Tweet
Nonetheless, I use the potential upside gains to plot the chart for her to see that if she takes on an entrepreneurial path, she will be pursuing a non-linear rewards traction in the future and this would mean building up money-making machines for herself that would finally provide her financial freedom and free her time up for her families and to pursue her “world-changing” plan, whatever that it.
But the stake is high and much riskier to her family’s bottom line so the decision will come down to whether she already has on hand a very solid b-plan that she believes in so much and think the opportunity cost is worth bearing.
Good luck.
“A thought is a substance, producing the thing that is imagined by the thought…. you must eliminate from your thoughts all doubt and uncertainty that you will get well; that you will succeed; that you will gain your point and get what you want. You may have some uncertainty as to methods, but you must have none as to ultimate results. You may not feel certain that you will succeed today, or next week, but you must feel certain that you will succeed sometime.”
― Wallace D. Wattles