Do You Have to Be Selfish to Be Successful?

It’s my 36th birthday today, and it happens to coincide with my 40th letter to Leo. So this week, I’m looking back at what nearly five years of being a dad, and 40 Tuesdays spent writing about it, have taught me about courage, getting older, ambition and being present. I’m also asking a question I haven’t been able to put down: do you have to be selfish to be successful?

Dear Leo,

It’s my birthday today.

I’m 36. And this is letter number 40.

Two numbers I can’t stop putting next to each other.

40 letters have now gone out on a Tuesday morning. And 40 is also the next age quietly humming in the background of my own life. Not loudly. Not as a crisis. Just awareness.

When I look at other people my age, or people turning 40 they sometimes seem more adult than I feel. Some days, I get a strange sense of imposter syndrome around it all.

How am I the same age as them?

How am I somebody’s dad?

When, exactly, did I become the adult in the room?

I wonder how many people reading this still feel the same. Perhaps adulthood isn’t something you ever completely arrive at. Maybe everybody is simply doing their best to look as though they know what they’re doing.

By the time I turn 40, you’ll be eight. Nearly 9.

Big school will be old news by then. You’ll have your own taste in music, your own way of dressing and, most likely, some fairly strong opinions about me.

So today, I’m going to write about the man writing the letters.

Because for the first thirty-one years of my life, I thought growing up was mostly about becoming someone.

For the last four and a half, it has been about being there for someone. Actually, you and your mum.

And that has changed almost everything.

What 40 letters have taught me:

When I started writing these letters, I thought I was recording lessons for you. Somewhere along the way, I realised you were teaching me how to see. You’ve taught me that time doesn’t necessarily erase the hard parts. It reshapes them.

I worked that out sitting opposite the hospital where you were born, looking at a building which used to own a part of me and realising that, somehow, it had loosened its grip.

The memory was still there. It just wasn’t in charge anymore. You’ve taught me that courage doesn’t always look brave. Sometimes it looks like standing at the edge of a swimming pool for a little longer than everybody else. Sometimes it looks like falling from a surfboard, coming back up laughing and asking to go again.

Children borrow courage from the people around them. But if we’re paying attention, I think we borrow some from you too.

You’ve taught me that the pressure we put on ourselves is very rarely the pressure you feel. You don’t care how much work I completed that day. You don’t know what I earned, what I achieved or whether somebody replied to my email. You just know whether I looked up when you called my name.

You’ve taught me that being your safe place doesn’t mean keeping the world away from you. It means giving you the confidence to go out into it. I can’t calm every sea you’ll sail into. I can only try to become the harbour you know you can return to.

And you’ve taught me that legacy isn’t the big thing you leave behind. It’s the small thing you repeat. How you speak to people. How you behave when you’re tired. Whether you keep your word. Whether the people you love receive the best of you, or only whatever is left.

I’ve also learnt that nobody has the map.

I never thought I would run across the Sahara Desert, start a podcast, create a bear inspired by my son, begin turning that character into a series of children’s books, or write a letter every Tuesday and somehow build a community of more than 15,000 people around them.

None of it arrived in the order I expected. In fact, most of it wasn’t planned at all. It was discovered.

And perhaps the biggest lesson is this: The amount of good in your life depends, at least partly, on your ability to notice it.

Marbella, Day of the FIFA World Cup Final

The question I keep circling around in my head at the moment is this.

Do you have to be selfish to be successful?

I’ve been turning that question over for months, and I still can’t quite put it down.

When I look around my industry at the people who are really flying, many of them don’t have young children. The ones who do often have a great deal of help.

That isn’t a criticism. It’s an observation.

And it arrives with an uncomfortable little maths problem attached.

Success asks you to protect your time ruthlessly. It asks for uninterrupted hours, early mornings, late nights and the willingness to put the goal ahead of almost everything else.

Parenthood doesn’t care much for uninterrupted hours. It arrives in the middle of the phone call. It needs breakfast while you’re answering emails. It needs picking up, dropping off, bathing, stories and one more drink of water after the lights have gone out.

It stands beside your desk and says, “Daddy, look at this,” at the exact moment you think you’re doing something important.

The difficult truth is that the person I would sometimes have to protect my time from is you. And when I do that maths honestly, I reach the same answer every time.

You win. Not narrowly. Not reluctantly. Every time.

But I’m also learning that choosing you doesn’t mean giving up on myself.

Being a good dad cannot mean becoming smaller and quietly resenting everything I didn’t do. I don’t want that lesson to become part of your inheritance either.

I want you to see me work hard. I want you to see me care deeply about something, get it wrong, begin again and finish what I started.

There will be mornings when work asks me to leave before you wake up. There will be nights when I miss bedtime. There will be races to run, books to finish and things I still need to prove to myself. That doesn’t mean I have chosen them instead of you. You don’t need every hour of my life. But you do need to know that when I’m with you, I’m actually there.

Your mum is trying to solve the same equation, only the world seems far more comfortable asking a mother to explain her ambition than it does a father.

Neither of us has solved it. I’m not sure anybody has.

What I can’t tell you is how the story ends.

Choosing this way might mean I never reach the place I once thought I was supposed to reach. There is a version of me, drawn up somewhere around twenty-six, who expected to have achieved a certain amount by now. Some mornings, the distance between him and the man sitting at this table feels heavier than others. And then I notice something. I can’t actually remember what he wanted. I know he wanted more. I don’t know what he wanted it for.

Which makes me think the problem was never the choice.

It was the definition.

I’m still ambitious. Probably more ambitious than is comfortable to admit in a letter this tender. I still want to build something meaningful. I still want the book, the stories, the adventures. But I no longer think success is simply about how much of a life I can build. I think it might be about how much of that life I’m actually there to live.

So I’m going to keep looking for the version where the work gets built and you still get the best of me. I don’t believe those two things are enemies. I think they’re just badly scheduled. But if life ever makes me choose between doing one of them properly, I already know which one I’m choosing.

I chose it on the 15th of November 2021, the day you arrived.

36.

So here’s what I have at thirty-six.

Your mum, who has been through more than anybody should and still gets up every morning ready to move mountains.

A book to finish.

A bear to introduce to the world. (Next month, our collaboration with Roarsome gets launched - event details coming soon on this). 

New York Marathon to run in November for your great-grandparents, on behalf of Alzheimer's Society Charity.

A body that still carries me towards difficult things.

A family I love coming home to.

And you.

Someone once asked me to define success. It was a question I was asked on a podcast called Extraordinary Lives, hosted by John Reynolds, who has become a great friend. 

My response to that question was this: a life you’d be proud to inherit.

It isn’t a house, a title or a number. It is a way of living that you might one day copy without even realising. That is the responsibility. And the privilege.

So here’s to 36. And here’s to 40 letters.

Twelve more until we’ve completed a full year, and I intend to use them properly.

Right, I can hear footsteps above me, which means my birthday is officially beginning.

You’ll come downstairs, ask if you’re going to nursery today, or the pump track. The answer is most definitely the pump track. We’re going to ride bikes together, take a cool box of snacks and drinks, and just ride. 

Love you always,

Daddy x

P.S. When I sent the first letter, I didn’t know whether anybody would read it, let alone stay for forty. Thank you for being here.

One question, if you have a minute: what would you tell yourself at thirty-six?

I’ll read every reply, like always.