They Have the Footage

Friday I told you to go watch yourself on a sales call. To sit in a room and look at the footage instead of trusting your memory.

Most of you won’t love what you see on that tape. Fine. It’s a sales call. You’ll fix it, close a few more deals, and move on.

But there’s another tape running on you. It’s been running for years. It’s got thousands of hours on it, and it’s been reviewed far more carefully than any sales call you’ll ever make.

Your kids have it.

Back in the late nineties, a researcher named Ellen Galinsky did something that, at the time, nobody had really done. She asked the children.

She surveyed more than a thousand kids, third grade through high school, about their working parents. And she asked them one question that should stop every man reading this cold.

If you were granted one wish to change the way your mother’s or father’s work affects your life, what would that wish be?

Then she asked the parents to guess what their kids would say.

Most parents guessed the kids would wish for more time together. Makes sense. That’s the guilt we all carry. We miss the game, we’re late to dinner, we travel. Of course they want more of us.

They didn’t. More time was on the list, but it wasn’t on top. The top wish, by a wide margin, was that their parents would be less stressed and less tired.

Only 2 percent of the parents saw that coming.

They didn’t ask for more of your time. They didn’t ask for more stuff, or for you to get a different job. They asked for a dad who wasn’t so stressed and so tired.

The kids weren’t asking for more of you. They were asking for a better version of the you they already get. The one who walks in the door at 6:40. The one at dinner checking his phone in his lap. The one who says “not now, buddy” in a voice that’s a little sharper than the situation needed.

Your kids have that guy on tape. Hundreds of hours of him. And they’ve reviewed it with the focus only a kid can bring, because to a kid, that guy is the weather. They wake up every morning and check what kind of day it’s going to be based on him.

In the full findings, Galinsky found something else that hit me harder. Kids worried about their parents. They noticed when dad was off. They read his moods, and they often misread them, sometimes deciding that a bad night had something to do with them.

That last part is the one I can’t shake. Your kid sees you come home quiet and wound up after a terrible day, and he doesn’t know about the client who threatened to walk. He just knows you were short with him. Kids are great at noticing and terrible at explaining, so he fills in the blank himself. Usually with himself.

Here’s the trap most of us fell into, and I fell in it as deep as anybody.

You tell yourself the stress is the price. You’re building something. You’re providing. The long days and the late nights are an investment in them. Someday the business will be in a place where you can ease off, and then you’ll be present, and they’ll get the full version of you.

There are two problems with that story.

The first is that someday keeps moving. You’ve noticed this. The next milestone always shows up with a new milestone behind it.

The second is worse. They’re not waiting for someday. They’re growing up now, on whatever version of you is showing up now. The tired version is the one they’re learning from. What a man looks like when he comes home. What work does to a person. Whether being an adult looks like something worth wanting.

You think you’re showing them how to provide. A lot of the time, what they’re actually watching is a guy who looks miserable at something he chose.

Every kid builds his idea of work from watching his parents. Whatever you tell him at dinner about following his passion, he’s mostly going off what he sees.

So ask yourself honestly what your footage shows.

Does it show a man who’s in charge of his work, or a man who’s run by it? Does work look like something that gives him energy and makes him proud, or something that drains him and makes him short? When he talks about his day, is it a story or a complaint? When the phone buzzes at dinner, does he pick it up?

This isn’t about being perfect. Your kids don’t need a dad who’s never stressed. That guy doesn’t exist, and if he did, he’d be a little creepy. They need to see a dad who gets stressed and then handles it. Who has a bad day and says so, out loud, and makes it clear it isn’t about them. Who comes back to himself.

That’s the lesson worth teaching. Work is hard sometimes, and a man can carry hard things and still be present for the people he’s carrying them for.

Somebody’s still watching your tape, and probably more than one somebody.

Your wife has the most footage of anyone. She knows exactly what the 6:40 version of you looks like, probably better than you do.

Your team has some too. The young guy who started with you last year is building his idea of what an owner looks like from you, the same way a kid builds his idea of a father. If you come in every Monday looking hunted, he learns that running a business means looking hunted. Some of them quietly decide they never want to run one. You’ll never hear that from them. They’ll just leave in three years and do something smaller.

Your nephews, your friends’ kids, the kid down the street whose dad isn’t around. Somebody is learning what a grown man looks like by watching you. You just don’t get to see the review.

This is Sunday, so I’m not giving you a seven step system. A few things to sit with instead.

Ask them. Tonight, or this week, when it’s calm. “If you could change one thing about how my work affects you, what would it be?” Then shut up and listen. Don’t explain. Don’t defend. Just take the note. Friday’s film room rules apply here too: the discomfort is the information.

If your kids are young, keep it simple. “What’s dad like when he gets home from work?” You’ll learn more from a five year old’s honest answer than from a year of guessing.

Build a buffer. The worst footage happens in the first ten minutes after you walk in the door. You’re still carrying the day. So don’t walk in carrying it. Sit in the car for five minutes. Take a walk around the block. Put the phone in the glove box. Decide, before you open the door, who you’re going to be for the next three hours. It sounds small, and it’ll change more of your footage than anything else on this list.

Narrate the bad days. When work is heavy, tell them. “I had a hard day today. It’s not about you. I just need a few minutes and then I’m all yours.” Kids can handle a stressed dad. What they can’t handle is a stressed dad who won’t say why, because they’ll write the reason themselves.

Go back when you blow it. You will. Some night you’ll snap at a kid who asked a fair question at a bad moment, and you’ll see his face change. Most men let it pass and hope it gets forgotten. It doesn’t. It goes on the tape with no ending.

So give it one. Later that night, or the next morning, go find him. Get down to his eye level. “Hey, I was short with you last night. That was my bad day, not anything you did. I’m sorry.” That’s all you have to say. It takes thirty seconds.

Those thirty seconds might be the most valuable footage on the whole reel. He learns that strong men own their mistakes. He learns that when somebody he loves gets it wrong, it can be made right. And he learns that his dad’s moods aren’t his job to manage. A kid who grows up watching his father repair what he breaks grows into a man who can do the same with his own family.

Most of us never saw our fathers do that. Not once. We can be the first.

Fix the real problem. If you’re coming home tired and short most nights, that’s not a parenting issue. It’s an operating issue. The business is running you. That’s fixable, and most of what we talk about on weekdays is about fixing it. The calendar, the delegation, the reserve, the systems. If you look closely, all of it was about this the whole time.

One more thing to check, because it’s where a lot of us get caught.

You probably think of weekends as the good footage. You’re home, you’re not at the office, you’re around. But being around and being there are two different things, and kids know the difference instantly.

Think about last Saturday. How much of it did you spend physically next to your kids while your head was on Monday? Standing at the grill answering a text. Watching the game with your phone in your hand. Saying “in a minute” to a kid who wanted you to see something, and then never actually coming to see it.

None of that feels like a big deal while it’s happening. It just feels like a normal Saturday. But play it back from where they’re sitting. Dad was home all day and they still didn’t get him.

Try this next weekend. Pick a two hour block on Saturday morning and make it phone free. Leave it in a drawer in another room. Do whatever they want to do, at their pace, even if it’s boring. Especially if it’s boring. Two hours, once a week, where they get the full version of you with nothing else competing for your attention.

You’ll be surprised how much it changes the rest of their week. Kids can run a long way on two good hours.

I’ll tell you what made me finally take this seriously.

My kid did something small. Asked a question at dinner, I think, while I was half reading an email. And I gave him a half answer. He didn’t push back or get upset. He just stopped asking. Went back to his food. And I realized he’d done it before. A lot. He’d learned that dad at dinner is a guy you don’t bother with the good stuff.

That’s what was on my tape. Not a big blowup. A thousand small moments of a kid learning I was somewhere else.

You can’t rewind the footage that’s already shot. But the camera is still rolling, and the next scene starts the next time you walk through the door.

Make it a good one.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus