A client of mine left $100 million to his wife and two grown kids after cancer took him at 66. He was Yale-educated, second-generation American, ran the family business his Russian immigrant father started, and worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, in the basement. His son, days away from becoming a father himself, told me: “I don’t want to be like my father.”
That conversation hit me hard. As a father who runs a business, I asked myself whether I’m doing the same thing to my own kids. A few days later I drove my 18-year-old son Jonah to the airport for a gap year in Israel, and he handed me a letter that referenced a passage I’d once read to him about Warren Buffett wishing he’d spent more time with his own children.
This essay is an excerpt from my book Soul in the Game. In it I work through what that client’s son said, what Jonah wrote back, and what Tim Urban’s estimate that we spend 93% of our total time with our parents before high school ends really means once you do the math on the years you have left with a five-year-old or a thirteen-year-old at home.
I also sit with the harder question underneath it: when work becomes a real-life Candy Crush where money is just chips we never intend to spend, what is the “more” actually costing us? My father often quoted The Little Prince: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
The full essay is at investor.fm.
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_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/
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