1: It was a broiling hot day.
Future entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz was early in his career. He was married with three young children.
One day, his father came to visit.
“We could not afford air-conditioning, and all three children were crying as my father and I sat there sweating in the 105-degree heat,” Ben writes in The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers.
His dad turned to him and said, “Son, do you know what’s cheap?”
Ben had no idea what his dad was talking about. He replied, “No, what?”
“Flowers. Flowers are really cheap. But do you know what’s expensive?” he asked.
Again, Ben replied, “No, what?”
He said, “Divorce.”
2: “Something about that joke, which was not really a joke, made me realize that I had run out of time,” Ben recalls.
“Up until that point, I had not really made any serious choices,” he writes. “I felt like I had unlimited bandwidth and could do everything in life that I wanted to do simultaneously.
“But his joke made it suddenly clear that by continuing on the course I was on, I might lose my family.
“By doing everything, I would fail at the most important thing,” he reflects. “It was the first time that I forced myself to look at the world through priorities that were not purely my own. I thought that I could pursue my career, all my interests, and build my family.”
3: At the time, Ben was working for NetLabs, a Silicon Valley startup. He had been hired by Roselie Schwager, who, along with her husband, Andre, a former Hewlett-Packard executive, was leading the company.
“Andre and Roselie had been brought in by the venture capitalists as the ‘professional management team,'” Ben writes.
“Unfortunately, they understood very little about the products or the technology, and they sent the company off in one crazy direction after the next,” he recalls. “This was the first time that I started to understand the importance of founders running their companies.”
To make his situation more complicated, Ben’s second daughter, Mariah, had been diagnosed with autism.
“Which made working at a startup a terrible burden for our family, as I needed to spend more time at home,” he remembers.
His dad’s joke made it clear to Ben that he was thinking of himself first.
“When you are part of a family or part of a group, that kind of thinking can get you into trouble, and I was in deep trouble,” he recalls.
“In my mind, I was confident that I was a good person and not selfish, but my actions said otherwise.”
This realization hit him hard.
“I had to stop being a boy and become a man. I had to put first things first,” Ben writes. “I had to consider the people who I cared about most before considering myself.”
Ben decided to quit NetLabs the next day.
“I found a job at Lotus Development that would allow me to my home life staightened out,” Ben explains. “I stopped thinking about myself and focused on what was best for my family. I started being the person that I wanted to be.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Where in my life am I trying to “do everything” and, in the process, quietly risking what matters most?
Action: Name one concrete way to re-align my time and energy this week—such as a change at work, boundary, or small sacrifice—so that my daily choices better reflect the person and priorities I care about most.