Observations from a 1st Year Dad

13 min readJan 2, 2021

How to even begin. Every year before 2020 had been eventful, and recent years had been even more so. Memorable. Full of growth, tears, joy, and most things in between. But I don’t think 2020 can be described in the same way, or in any other way that accurately describes it. I think everyone understands.

On a personal front, it was my first full year as a dad, and it was the first year I had taken off the ‘training wheels’ for Syncio, having been through accelerator programs via MAP in 2018, and Startmate in 2019.

Syncio, in its third year of operation, tripled in revenue, and our team of 3 has also tripled to a team of 9 all-stars operating globally.

And whilst the learnings from Syncio have again been immense, I find myself reflecting most on fatherhood, on purpose, life, and the like.

With everything considered, here are some of the observations that my daughter has helped me learn and reflect upon.

Growth

Despite only posting one article this year, I’ve actually been (freely) writing more consistently than I’ve ever done so at any stage of my life.

I generally write a daily journal entry and keep it very casual. It’s usually just a spray of words. And sometimes it can be quite detailed. Every time though, it has been game changing. I don’t usually read the journal entries after writing. I might have done it just a few times, and when I did, I have found what I was experiencing, thinking, and feeling at the time to be quite insightful, surprising, and sometimes profound, to the point where I might even chuckle to myself.

However, due to the private nature of journal entries, it just doesn’t have that ‘time stamp’ impact that blog articles have. Because no one but yourself is your audience, you don’t get much diversity in feedback that a blog article might get.

Recently, a team member at Syncio read an old article I wrote about how terrifying it was to take a holiday as an entrepreneur (read here), which then led him down a rabbit hole through the rest of my articles. It then got some of the other team members reading, including myself.

One article I re-read was the one where I wrote about meeting my best friend’s then-6-month-old baby, and the lessons that I had learnt from his baby. I had to wonder, now that I have my own baby, would those lessons still resonate? Re-reading the article actually surprised me by how much those lessons still did.

But what dawned upon me wasn’t so much about questioning the relevance of my old lessons, for that question didn’t really matter at all. Rather, the surprise was in the answers — that what was learnt had simply become a continuation of what I continue to learn now. The reinforcement of those lessons are just accelerated now in a way I can sometimes seldom keep up with.

To best sum up what I’m trying to say, I’ll refer to the movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. In one of the scenes, Oprah has Fred Rogers as a guest on her show, and mentions how you forget what it’s like to be a child, to which Mr Rogers responds:

Well, but those children can help re-evoke what it was like. That’s why, when you’re a parent, you have a new chance to grow.

A new chance to grow. What a wonderful gift. And growing is best seen through measuring over time. Perhaps my daughter will one day be able to read this and other articles that I have written.

We are all equal

Still on the movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, I remember seeing a trailer for it and being totally engrossed by it. It was something that I felt compelled to see. I don’t normally get that feeling too often, and if I do, it’s usually for films that are a little more fast paced, like a horror or something. I certainly did not expect it for a film about Fred Rogers.

That feeling didn’t go away after the trailer, and persisted until I actually did watch the movie. When I finally had a chance to watch the movie, there is a scene that had a perverse effect on me more than any other scenes in the movie (and there were quite a few).

It was the scene where Fred Rogers takes Lloyd through the subway to his apartment, and then is noticed by children in his carriage, who then break out to sing the Fred Rogers theme song. Steadily after, practically everyone on the carriage joins in with the children. It almost brought me to tears.

That scene was such a powerful juxtaposition for everything that was happening in the world in 2020. The pandemic, for obvious reasons, but for me personally, the Melbourne lockdown and then hard lockdown on the housing commission flats, really affected me. It was personal, but also hit-home the reality of how the rest of society sees our most vulnerable and disadvantaged. And of course, the events that triggered the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrate this further.

And then, watching this scene — where kids of various races, police officers standing next to them, and people of all ages and backgrounds, all singing together, was just too much for me. Everyone in that carriage would have watched the Fred Rogers show and learnt the theme song when they were a child. That was when everyone was equal. It really hit home to me that everyone is the same, and everyone was a child, so pure and full of hope and optimism.

Do what you love

At Syncio, everyone has to set 3 professional and 3 personal goals for the year. The rationale behind this is, for better or worse, that work makes up a large part of your waking life. If we sleep 8 hours a day, then half of your waking day will be consumed at work, 5 days a week. That’s a large chunk of your life. So that part of the day can really influence the quality of your non-work day, and vice-versa.

That’s why it’s really important for people to align their work and personal lives to get the most out of whatever they are doing. Getting to understand a person’s personal goals can open up a different dialogue, another angle into that person’s life, and in turn, encourage empathy. And for that person, setting goals can help them find that reflective space to identify and then focus on the things that will help accomplish what they set out in life.

One thing out of many things that I’m proud of at Syncio, is the diversity of our team in terms of their backgrounds, and how their respective journeys have all converged to now intertwine with each other. To get to Syncio required many twists and turns. To do what they do now, has required a lot of experimentation in terms of what they did, and who they did it for.

Part of this experimentation is a combination of learning what they like to do, but also having the courage, awareness, and humility, to decide to try something new. This is much easier said than done, because with most choices as an adult, there are multiple factors to consider. Family, now, is the dominant factor in my own choice making, and so comes a very blunt intersection of doing what you love versus doing something that will provide the most for your family. I’m sure many with children or dependents are faced with this cold reality.

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, wrote an essay entitled “How to Do What You Love” that explores the pathways to doing what you love, but also the pathways that lead to doing what you don’t love, which is far more common than the former. The most poignant part of Graham’s article for me was the following:

The most dangerous liars can be the kid’s own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.

Being from an immigrant background, this one resonated, though being able to choose the type of work you love in this case may be more of a privilege rather than something anyone can just choose. However, this isn’t likely the case with me and those of my generation, and so I do have the privilege to make choices, and keep making choices until I get it right.

Now as a parent, I think about what type of parent I want to be when my daughter is old enough to tell when I come home, or out of my WFH room, whether the work I do nourishes me or depletes me of energy. Seeing that work can be done for more than half of a person’s entire life, for 5 days a week, I think this is a critically important lesson to pass onto my daughter — that doing what you love, or enjoy, is worth it. And more than worth it, that it is entirely possible.

Adventure

There is another subway scene from another movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, that surprised me in a way that can only happen if you thought you should’ve known it coming. A moment where your adult rational-self had cynically dismissed, before slowly coming to the realisation that this was exactly how your mind used to operate when you were a child.

That scene was where Will Smith and his son are stuck in the subway, having just missed the final train. Both exhausted, the son suddenly dismisses an earlier proclamation from a stranger that the bone density machine that Will was carrying, was a time machine. Will then argues that it is in fact a time machine, and then gets his son to press a button on it to take them back in time. They land somewhere in a time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and it doesn’t take long for Will’s son to get totally immersed in this fantasy/reality.

Disregarding plot development conveniences, the ease in which Will’s son lets his imagination take hold to go along with Will’s façade is something all kids are capable of. If you think back to your own childhood, you will remember an infinite realm of possibilities at the tip of your imagination. In the morning you’re a cowboy or cowgirl, in the afternoon, you’re a space explorer, and then in the evening you are a rockstar. You could make anything come true in the world that your adventure played in.

Nowadays, I get to re-explore this realm of imagination with my daughter. And whilst only one and not able to verbally communicate whatever’s on her mind, I still get that sense of excitement and pure joy from her whilst playing things that most 30 something-year-olds would never do on their own. I know that this realm is only going to get more vibrant as she gets older, and I really look forward to exploring this world with her. It would also hopefully reopen a long-dormant world within me, and I can’t think of anything more fun than to combine our creativity and imaginations for some grand adventures to come.

Children’s books

The bookstore usually groups its inventory into categories to make it easy for shoppers to find what they want. One such category is the ‘Children’s’ section, which, admittedly, I had never spent any amount of time in before I became a dad. Which I assume is fairly common for most others who don’t have any good reason to be in the section, other than to look suspiciously out-of-place.

Seeing that my daughter has just turned one, some of her books are pretty basic — teaching concepts such as the alphabet or numbers. However, some of her books, whilst also basic in terms of narrative, have incredibly deep lessons in them. A book that was recently gifted to us, called ‘The World Needs Who You Were Made to Be’ talks about celebrating your individuality as well as celebrating everyone else’s. It’s beautiful to be uniquely you, and it’s beautiful to have diversity.

We have other books that teach a similar lesson, or explore a similarly empowering theme. As well as teaching the building blocks of language, science, and numeracy, I have found that children’s books also teach the building blocks to living an enriched, fulfilled life. On Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, these books are explaining the importance of self-actualisation! This is both amazing and sad at the same time.

Amazing because it’s one of the most important things you can learn about. And also, personally, I love reading them. But sad, because, well, after childhood, there are seldom any books like this taught in school. And then you enter the workforce, as an adult, and it’s really easy to forget about these lessons.

Maybe, these books only appeal to children who haven’t seen the ‘real world’ yet. They haven’t had their spirits brought down by the negativity, pain, and suffering around us. It might be hard for a person who has just been discriminated against to stomach a book that tells you that the world needs who you were made to be.

The other thing to note is that these books are probably best digested when the reader/audience isn’t conscious of any expectations. A child that has already been set the expectation to be a certain way, or to follow a certain path, may feel conflicted/confused/jaded by being taught to follow their own path.

As much as I say I won’t, I already have certain expectations of my daughter whether it be conscious/unconscious. These expectations relate to anything from physical attributes like height, to her personality, to her toy preferences, etc. Expectations aren’t bad, but it really does depend on what those expectations are. I will try and help her focus less on some of the nonsense, vanity metrics that, especially, a girl, will be subject to. But for now, it is quite beautiful for her to just be herself, as only she can.

I think the other thing to note is that we’re in a pretty privileged position to be even buying (or being gifted) these types of books for my daughter to read. We live in a country with liberal, democratic ideologies that promote books that teach values I want to instil in my daughter. I highly doubt that I would have access to a book that promotes individualism in an oppressed, fascist country. It might even be dangerous for me to even think of such things.

Present

Spending heaps of time with my daughter through lockdown was one of my most cherished memories of 2020. Maybe it’s the physiological changes in me that have shielded me from the many less pleasurable experiences of being a dad, but there is something truly magical about experiencing life with your child. They are a magnetic force that just draws you to them, no matter how tired you are.

Paul Graham (again) sums up my feelings perfectly:

You could just be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn’t trade these moments for anything. One doesn’t tend to associate kids with peace, but that’s what you feel. You don’t need to look any further than where you are right now… Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day.

And whilst these moments are priceless, they do require you to be fully present. This was something that I struggled with at times, particularly when I was tired and stressed. There were many periods that felt just overwhelmingly busy at Syncio that were hard to ignore. But I had to. And when there was no other choice, I was thankful that my wife would always be there to help. Though, this was something that I was reluctant to draw on too often. So most of the time, I had to be present, because a baby deserves and demands your full attention, but also, when you are with your baby, counterintuitively, you get to experience these moments of peace.

Sometimes my rational mind helps me stay focused on being present. It tells me that the anxiety that I feel isn’t realistic, unlikely to occur, and ultimately unproductive to think about. Sometimes though, when it’s a more heightened sense of anxiety, I’ve had to draw upon something that I seldom had to in the past — faith.

I’ve never been religious, or spiritual. I’m pretty firmly agnostic. But I’ve also believed that the people that I know with the strongest faith, are also those that seem the strongest, most optimistic, and grounded. In the year that we’ve just all had, this has only reinforced my observations.

In my Confucian-centric cultural upbringing, my dad often cites tian — a concept of heaven, that guides our lives, similar to fate or destiny. I used to always call bull on this, as I also grew up believing that I have total agency in what I do, and therefore, what I become. But I think that was because I was so focussed on winning. When you accept concepts like tian, winning or losing isn’t so important anymore.

Whilst that also seems like a cop out to mediocrity, it really isn’t. It’s basically the same as saying that the journey is more important than the destination. But in that narrative, you as the hero always determined what journey you went on. But that’s not necessarily true. The twists and turns, the characters that play a role in your narrative, can seemingly materialise completely outside of your control.

Accepting that has given me some peace, and confidence, that I can fully immerse myself and enjoy the experience, the only experience we can really experience — the present. And what better way to experience it, than to experience it with my daughter and family. A journey that has just begun.