Things I learnt in my paternity leave about people, work and mostly myself
With the birth of my second child my workplace was awesome enough to allow for a full 30 days of paternity leave. I’m sitting here during the final couple of days before I’m going back jotting down some of the lessons I learnt during this period of time.
While refining the list, I highlighted some takeaways and expanded them to a blog post. You may find those insights useful and the best part is that you are not required to have a child in order to obtain them. Although a new baby smells amazing, just saying.
People love to help, so ask for help
This is something life is hitting me over the head with countless times and yet asking for help is one of those things I’m struggling with the most. Maybe it’s “I can do it by myself” state of mind or “I really wouldn’t want to bother” perception, who knows. The truth to the matter is that every time I am amazed by the willingness and joyfulness of people where they land a hand. In his book “Nonviolent communication: A language for life” Marshall Rosenberg describes “true giving” as a state where both a request and needs are met in a heart to heart connection, and I believe that is what I experienced.
My family and I are both new to a country and recently moved to a new state and even though we are completely missing any support structure people sent dinner, people came by to check on how are we doing, people texted and offered help, two people actually flown in from another state! What is truly amazes me is the fact that we are talking about strangers, people who heard from a friend of a friend that some new family moved in and they just had a baby, that’s all it took for some people to touch our lives and be incredible.
I’m writing both of these paragraphs as a reminder for myself: When I’m at work wearing the product manager’s hat, asking support, delegating or calling for a team effort comes very natural yet I feel I can go one layer deeper than that. When was the last time I tried exposing myself and say “hey, I’m not good at the thing, would you mind helping?”. Furthermore, people helping others can have great manifestation in products that I’m involved at on multiple levels: The human basic need to help and be helped can contribute to the humanization of a product, have people carry each other through experiences that we think are too complicated or cumbersome. Do we really have to “explain” and “onboard” when we can create a community and empower people who use our products along the way?
“I’m tired” can be transformed into “I’m passionate”
Side story: In one of my business trips I took a taxi ride with an NYC driver and we went ahead and talked about challenges in our professions (that’s another name for bitching about life). One thing he kept going back to it the “I have to hustle” mentality. “I have to hustle so I can get a new car”, “I have to hustle so my kid can go out with her friends”. In the tech world we are all hustling in a sense that we put in the hours, we push the spirits forward and we’re constantly on the “ship, measure, learn, iterate, repeat” cycle.
With the new baby, came the inevitable sleep deprivation. Reflecting on what the NYC taxi driver said, I made a decision to “hustle” and use that non-sleep time to hustle-it, tech world style. What ended up happening is that I found new meaning where “hustle” became “get passionate”: I ended up doing less work related things and reading more books, articles I’ve been putting away and learning new things.
Circling back to the “tech world hustle”, I’m now at a point where I’m coming back to work with a more holistic view of the products I’m involved at and have “Sharpened the saw” so my product management toolbox is (at least I believe) a bit more refined and thought through. This is instant value and not to say that when the baby sleeps though the night I’ll keep sleeping 2–3 hours, but looking back on all those evenings and weekends where I was “too tired to blog” or “start the project” I believe that the “hustle” will be there now and I’ll be able to pull this off with another newborn (I can always ask for help right?).
Fear of missing out is a fad, focus on what’s important
You know what’s really cool about this world? is that no matter what happens, when you wake up in the morning the sky are always at the same place and unless you’re living where I live they are blue and cloud-free.
The team at my work place did an amazing job of cutting me out of the loop and made sure I did the one job I had. I tried to fish for updates, I knew things are hectic because when are they not and the most fearful thing — decisions are being made and priorities and being shifted around while I’m not there(!) what I got in return was “take care of your family, we got this”.
What started as a minor freak-out on my side (“if possible, keep me in the loop on decisions”) became something I have never experienced ever before: The products kept running, when my input was needed I was called in but for the most part I was out of the loop and I could actually, for the first time focus on one major project while the world kept spinning in other parts which I did not have any control of. Granted, I feel that this could be carried out only because the team is so mature and awesome but on the individual level this taught me an important lesson: I can do the things I do great, the less important things will continue to roll and when I look back to check on them the sky will be at the same place. Likely. Hopefully.
Wrapping up
Any of the things above can easily qualify as a “new years resolution” or something along the lines of a to-do list. The truth is that I feel this post should be a twofold reminder for me: One of the great time I had with my family and the newest addition (hey future Omer, remember that awesome month you had? Go look at baby photos). Second, of the new things I learnt that are defiantly part of me and I can’t wait until they are further processed, reflected and refined.
To the team at work, thank you for being to awesome and allowing for all of this to happen, I will see you soon!
— OK
Follow me on @omerkaplan for tech, product management and eSports. Thanks for reading!
