10,000 Independent Decisions | Oji Udezue (Dad of 2, Author, Typeform, Calendly, Twitter)

[00:00:00] Oji Udezue: A lot of parents have the instinct to remove difficulty from their children. You’ll see people talk about, “We made it here so that they can have an easier life,” and all those kinds of philosophies. But the species is very old. Homo sapiens, 300,000, maybe 50,000 years of recorded human history. We already know, and we’ve known for a very long time, that suffering is what makes people resilient. Suffering is what makes people strong, and ease does not. And so there’s a lot of modern impulses that parents have to resist.
[00:00:44] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I’m your host, Adam Fishman. Oji Udezue is a product leader with 25 plus years of experience across Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian, Bridgewater, and Microsoft. He’s thought more about the product function and the work than most of his peers. So today I asked him to bring his amazing product brain to our parenting discussion. Together, he and his wife, also a product leader, have raised two kids who are now teenagers.
Today’s conversation was a masterclass in shaping resilient kids, what it means, how to do it, and how to know if you’re being successful. We talked about thriving in a dual-career household while raising a family, impressive frameworks like 10,000 hours of independent decisions and parents as shepherds, not owners, and why kids are expanders and adapters to just about anything. I especially enjoyed his perspective on suffering, his alternatives to gentle parenting, and how he rewards his kids for lateral thinking.
If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify so you never miss an episode. You’ll find it everywhere you get your podcasts. Welcome Oji Udezue to Startup Dad. It is such a pleasure having you here today. Thanks for joining me.
[00:02:09] Oji Udezue: Thanks, Adam. I’m super excited. This is not usually something people like us talk about, so I’m excited. It’s going to be a journey.
[00:02:17] Adam Fishman: That’s why I do it. And a special shout-out to Lloyd Lobo, a past guest of mine who connected the two of us. So way to go, Lloyd. Thank you for making this conversation happen.
[00:02:26] Oji Udezue: Absolute Lloyd.
[00:02:29] Adam Fishman: Okay, so I recently watched you and your wife as an AMA on Lenny’s podcast, which was an amazing conversation about product management and AI, and I learned a lot about you two professionally. But this show, we do things a little differently, so we’re going to talk about your life as a dad and as a husband.
So, you and your wife have two kids, 17 and 15. You just co-wrote a book together called Building Rocket Ships, which you have in the background, and you have yourselves a significant set of professional careers for the last couple of decades. So I was doing some math, and I think that when your oldest kid was born, you were a lead PM on Windows Live at Microsoft. Does that sound right?
[00:03:14] Oji Udezue: Yeah, it does.
[00:03:16] Adam Fishman: Okay. And your wife was working at T-Mobile at the time. So you were both hardworking, big corporate professionals. If you think back on that time in your life, you both have two careers that are on this fast upward trajectory, probably very high pressure. What was the decision like to start a family, or what was that conversation like?
[00:03:37] Oji Udezue: We tried to live our lives with purpose. I don’t think it was clear that the job had much to do with it. I think, really, for me, it was like, well, let’s get to know each other before we introduce other humans into it. And once we hit a threshold where we thought that was sufficient, we decided to pull the trigger. We had a stable life, a home, all these things. So we did it.
The question wasn’t when to do it beyond our own comfort with doing it. The question was how do we distribute our time? And so that became the main question very quickly, like we are busy. How do you distribute your time?
[00:04:23] Adam Fishman: Did you have conversations about that, and how did you react to becoming new parents?
[00:04:29] Oji Udezue: Yeah, I’m very principle-driven, so everything that I just talked about, including when to have children, is driven by principle. The principle was: don’t get pregnant immediately. You don’t try to make sure you like each other and you have some space. Children give you very little space. It’s all hands on deck. Children are sort of non-elective relationships. No matter what relationship you have with your kids, you have them for your lifetime. Your romantic relationship is elective. You can end it at any time.
So we wanted to norm that one before we brought the non-elective into play. Even that articulation was principle-driven, so we talked about that. We also talked about once we have them, how do we make time and how do we maintain our life?
And we were a little delusional early on. Once my wife healed and all these things, we just pretended like nothing had happened, and we’d take this kid to parks and take him to parties. He would be in a party in a bassinet sleeping while we were just acting like we’re not parents. We tried very hard to maintain the equanimity of our life.
The upside for my first son — we cooled down by the time we had the second one — was that he could sleep in a bar with a lot of noise. He wasn’t afraid of people picking him up because people did that all the time, and he got used to it. And so that was good for him.
[00:05:59] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome. I imagine the two of you really worked hard to stay happening. It sounds like you were still in the social phase of your life. Is that right?
[00:06:09] Oji Udezue: We were young, and we wanted to not go through the shock of all these tropes about parenting and turn into boring parents. And so we’re like, let’s make the kid conform to our life, not the other way around.
[00:06:24] Adam Fishman: I’ve heard on this show a handful of parents who are like, “We’re just going to keep living our lives and the kid is along for the ride.”
[00:06:32] Oji Udezue: I’m big on that because I don’t want to be the kind of parent who lives through their children. If you do too much deferment, then the child becomes the avatar of your dreams or the things you deferred, and that’s just too much pressure. Your life continues. Your learning continues. Being a parent doesn’t stop any of that. So be careful about the trade-off between the energies for your children and the energies for yourself.
[00:06:58] Adam Fishman: Yeah. One of the things that comes to mind when you talk about taking your son everywhere, and this idea that anybody could pick him up, he could sleep through anything, is this idea of resiliency. One of the topics I wanted to talk about today with you is raising resilient kids. What does it mean to you to be resilient as a kid or to raise a resilient kid?
[00:07:22] Oji Udezue: In short, it is to be able to run into opposition or disagreement or suffering and just be able to get through it. And it’s important because a lot of parents have the instinct to remove difficulty from their children.
You’ll see people talk about, “We made it here so that they can have an easier life,” and all those kinds of philosophies. But the species is very old. Homo sapiens, 300,000, maybe 50,000 years of recorded human history. We already know, and we’ve known for a very long time, that suffering is what makes people resilient. Suffering is what makes people strong, and ease does not.
And so there’s a lot of modern impulses that parents have to resist. And they can do it. It is thinking with your limbic brain and thinking with your cerebellum. Your limbic brain is, “Let’s make life easy. I have this much stuff.” The cerebellum is like, “Wait a second, if I do that, they’re not going to make it.”
And so you have to balance your limbic system with your real cognition based on human history, because your limbic system doesn’t know anything about history — it’s just lizard.
[00:08:49] Adam Fishman: Your limbic system wants to stay in the cave and your cerebellum is like, “Well, if I go out from the cave, I’m going to get eaten by this tiger. Now I’m too soft.”
[00:08:58] Oji Udezue: Yeah. Cerebellum has read The Time Machine by Jules Verne. It’s read all of these things and it knows that life is cyclical. People suffer to make it, make life soft for their children, and then the children can’t do anything.
And rich people extend that by creating trusts and family mottos and things that box the kids, including money. But ultimately the kids are screw-ups. I could name politicians or people that are dynasty people who are completely useless.
Occasionally, by the way, there’s usually some kid in a dynasty who was just born motivated. Well, that’s just luck. DNA.
[00:09:44] Adam Fishman: They’ve worked as hard as they can to undermine that, but somehow it still works.
[00:09:48] Oji Udezue: Yeah. They get there, and somehow some people are just born with innate motivation. It doesn’t matter how rich they are or how poor they are. Sometimes you’re lucky. Usually it’s not the first-born though, so sorry about that.
[00:10:01] Adam Fishman: I’m screwed. I’m totally screwed.
[00:10:03] Oji Udezue: Then the second and third and fourth born have to compete early on, and it gives them a little DNA push.
[00:10:11] Adam Fishman: I love that.
[00:10:11] Oji Udezue: So yeah, I think it is challenge. It is resistance. Resilience is about pushing through resistance, and so therefore resistance must exist.
[00:10:24] Adam Fishman: When you think about setting this up for your kids so that they don’t… obviously you and your wife have been quite successful in your career. You’ve accumulated some wealth. I’m certain of it. We all work in tech. We know how much people get paid for these jobs.
I’m curious what you’ve done to create that resilience in your own kids. What sort of challenges have you laid down in front of them or how have you helped them?
[00:10:50] Oji Udezue: I think it’s difficult. If you are well off, you live in nice neighborhoods and have a nice house and can afford good schools and stuff, you can’t fool your children. They know you have means.
When I was a younger parent, not as smart, I used to talk about simulated suffering or simulated scarcity. But I think ultimately it doesn’t work because your children know it’s not real. And knowing it’s not real is safety. They can rely on it regardless of how you appear.
I think there are a few things that I’ve done. One is when they were gullible, meaning really young, I made them believe that once they were a certain age, they were done. It didn’t matter how much we had; they were on their own. It wasn’t really true, but I said it enough times that under 10 they started believing it and internalizing it, and maybe prepping their brains for, “Man, this man is not going to be there.”
[00:12:01] Oji Udezue: When they were older and they could worry about it versus think about it, I started to bring the nuance of what support looks like for them because I don’t want them to be terrified. Children aren’t terrified — they don’t think about it deeply — but teenagers can be terrified. So you have to bring in nuance. When they were older and they could worry about it versus think about it, I started to bring the nuance of what support looks like for them because I don’t want them to be terrified. Children are simple. They’re not going to be terrified of it, although it affects them, but teenagers can be terrified, so you have to bring in the nuance. So that’s one thing.
And then sort of a related idea is this thing about independence. It turns out that true independence invites resistance. I was born in Nigeria and I went to boarding house when I was 10. So from 10 to 15 I did not live at home nine months out of the year. Now, it sounds amazing to Americans, but this is very normal for middle-class Nigerian children. We go off to boarding school just like British aristocrats — well, we’re not aristocrats, just to be clear — around that time.
And then once we’re done with high school, we go to university. So the average Nigerian child is going through a college-like process by the time they’re 16 to 18, and they have run their own life because in boarding school you have to wake up, be neat, clean up your space, go to school, listen, take it in, do your own homework, and either get an A or not get an A, and your parents are not around.
And so this is what American kids learn at 18 when they get into college. We start learning it much earlier. And I wanted the same for my children. I knew it would be a game-changer if they lived in the United States. It would give them an advantage. But sadly, I couldn’t actually do that.
But then I thought about what I wanted to do, and I decided that I could distill boarding house into a more basic idea, which is the idea of independent decisions.
[00:13:58] Oji Udezue: I basically distilled my experience into 10,000 reps of independence. That was what boarding house did for me — away from parental oversight. It was like I practiced independence.
And so, in our lives, what I tried to do was to create an environment for 10,000 hours of independence. I didn’t always succeed, but things like pumping the gas, getting groceries while I’m in the coffee shop — you go do it — when they’re small, always prompting for decisions: “What’s your decision?” versus “Here’s mine.”
I think that’s a very helpful idea and something you can get super creative with.
And then the second one is you have to stop catching them. You have to expose them to consequences. “Oh, you lost the thing that I bought for you and you want another one? Well, now you have to go halfsies, or you have to buy it yourself.” And then you can feel the consequences. Or just like, you got hurt — you’re not bleeding out, but yeah, it hurts. Sorry.
[00:15:03] Adam Fishman: You know where the Band-Aids are.
[00:15:04] Oji Udezue: The instinct is to catch and protect from consequences. Basically, don’t do that unless it’s life-threatening.
[00:15:11] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I like that perspective — that independence perspective and this idea of don’t catch them. Kids can be resilient if we let them.
[00:15:22] Oji Udezue: And by the way, just so that people don’t think I’m so mean, thinking like a typical African whatever — and I don’t know that these ideas are very salient here — it’s not like you shouldn’t catch them; it’s that you shouldn’t catch them for trivial shit.
You are the backstop. And let me just extend this in case someone quotes this and finds it useful. The point is: if you can create an environment where your children make as many mistakes as possible before they’re 20, 25… every mistake you make, the older you get, the harder it is to retrieve.
And so before they’re 20, literally you can be the ultimate backstop. You can pretend not to be, but you can essentially prevent a death and decay. You shouldn’t prevent triviality — you should let it run. But you can prevent the ultimate, which is you losing your child, whether emotionally or suicide or whatever. You can prevent that.
[00:16:23] Oji Udezue: The older they get, they will keep making mistakes, but you’re supposed to learn from each mistake. So if they’ve made too few mistakes by the time they’re 30, you can’t actually do anything because they’re away from you. They’re not within your circle of control. They might not even be your friend — they might not listen to you.
So force an environment where there is micro, mini, medium failure — where you are the ultimate backstop — but allow it. Allow the minis, allow the mediums, allow it. If you don’t allow it, they won’t learn fast enough for you to catch them when they make some other big mistake.
[00:16:59] Adam Fishman: It’s important for them to make a lot of mistakes when they’re younger because the stakes are lower. And as they get older, those stakes go up, and your ability to help them learn decreases because they’re…
[00:17:12] Oji Udezue: …or help save their life, honestly. And so you want to maximize the time that you actually have real backstop power. It’s a principle. I fail at it all the time, but it’s something that I think about, and I get creative, and I’m intentional about as well.
[00:17:29] Adam Fishman: The timeline for a kid growing up is quite long. They’re not really an adult… well, I guess in your case, you said your kids in the Nigerian culture are kind of getting there. They’re close.
[00:17:40] Oji Udezue: Yeah. Look, I’m from the Igbo culture. Most African cultures have — by the time you’re 16, 18 — you’re going through the age grade. The Maasai will hunt a lion and maybe kill it, depending. So by the time you’re 20, you’re supposed to be a full-fledged man.
None of this stuff we do in the United States. The United States is super complicated. Sometimes if you’re a minority, you’re an adult. If you’re not, you’re not an adult. And so there’s this variability. But in the end, it is all governed by college and drinking.
So people expect people to be children until 18 for some reason. And then for some reason by 21 then maybe there’s something, but you can’t rent a car until you’re 25. I don’t know, dude. I don’t know what’s going on.
[00:18:28] Adam Fishman: It is kind of wild now that you mention it.
[00:18:31] Oji Udezue: But I think most other places in the world — which is most of the world, because the United States and Europe are just a fraction, a tiny fraction of the world — people are supposed to grow up faster because the world is tougher in those places. And so in most of the world, by 18, 20, you are an adult. You’re expected to produce. If not physical things or work, your mindset is supposed to be adult.
I think that’s a huge leg up in the world. Maybe if you’re in the United States, it doesn’t matter because you’re surrounded by people who don’t grow up until they’re 20, and we make excuses for them all the time. But in other parts of the world, it gives you a leg up because you are able to handle difficult things at that age.
And so I’m trying to have fun, but also in my children, I’m super convinced they are hyper-mature for their age. It’s been an intentional thing for them. And it’s not serious — it’s just like, I know that if I leave them in a jungle, I want them to survive. That kind of thing.
[00:19:31] Adam Fishman: They’re not going to get eaten by the tiger when they leave the cave.
[00:19:35] Oji Udezue: No, no, no. They’re going to figure out how to kill it.
[00:19:38] Adam Fishman: So when we talk about building products, there’s a long journey, much like raising kids, and you kind of check in and you get these sort of inputs and feedback along the way that something is going, and you’re iterating. So how do you know if you’re successful in this with kids? What are your evals?
[00:19:57] Oji Udezue: It’s like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. You don’t fully know 100 percent ever. You have to observe them through difficulty. Even micro things — like when something goes wrong but not wrong enough to be life-threatening or anything — how do they handle it? Are they cool under pressure or do they start freaking out?
And actually, this is easy to observe all the time because things go wrong often. You’re looking for people who register, ask questions, understand, and act. Because this is what we expect from mature people in the workplace.
So you have to observe these moments just like you observe them with your employees. And make a decision. If they fail — because they’ll fail a lot, because you fail a lot — then you coach through it.
“Hey, hey kid. Listen. Remember that time this thing happened and there was a little spider running around and you just lost your marbles? Well, listen. Next time, how I want you to think about reacting is just remove yourself. But there’s no need to yell — it doesn’t help anything. And then start to ask, how do I solve a problem?”
They might not do that the very next time they see a thing, but they will listen, and it will become part of their pedagogy.
[00:21:00] Oji Udezue: So one: it’s not easy to know because life is difficult. Two: you watch their micro reactions to even small difficulty. And three: you listen to them. People reveal themselves if they talk long enough. So listen. Be an active listener.
They are going through challenges out of your eyeline — in school, with their teachers, with peers. They’ll tell you stories that you were not part of that tell you how they’re reacting to difficult things.
[00:21:53] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Especially as they get older, you’re not there nearly as much as you are when they’re younger.
[00:21:59] Oji Udezue: In the teenage years, for example, your voice gets muted. They don’t listen to it. They listen to their peers. You can learn a lot by being curious about the stories of them and their peers.
[00:22:11] Adam Fishman: You and your wife have both been building product and executive careers for a long time now — many decades. Your kids have observed this while you’re going about your lives. Is that something that’s come up at the dinner table? Is that something that you actively talk about with your kids?
[00:22:31] Oji Udezue: I think partially. For example, some of the travel shows up in family scheduling. A book launch will show up on family scheduling. A keynote at some conference will show up in family scheduling. So there are always entry points.
Kids are super selfish. They don’t give a shit how you make money as long as they get to go to school and have fun, whatever. These guys are just people who provide for me, and that’s the way the world works.
[00:23:01] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Did you ever try to impart wisdom on your kids around decision-making or anything on the job? Kids are just not going to be interested in that.
[00:23:13] Oji Udezue: Kids are profoundly uninterested in your work. Maybe earlier on, when they’re super young, they are. But it’s sort of a childish curiosity. They know that their friends’ parents do other things. Maybe they’re interested. And occasionally, you’ll go to elementary school for show-and-tell for parents’ stuff. STEM stuff. You’ll do all that.
What I find is that you have to distill whatever from the work that’s worth transmitting. You have to distill it and inject it into normal conversation. So if you want to teach them about wisdom, don’t say, “Oh, I learned this decision framework at work.”
[00:23:50] Adam Fishman: Right. They’re just going to tune you right out.
[00:23:53] Oji Udezue: If that’s a wake-up call for any parent—well, I’m sorry for you, man. They literally don’t care.
[00:23:59] Adam Fishman: We’re building resilient parents here on the show, one episode at a time.
[00:24:03] Oji Udezue: No, no. You definitely need to talk to parents. Parents are delusional in this country.
[00:24:08] Adam Fishman: I love that. One of your kids is about to head off to college here in another year. They’re in their last year of high school. Have they expressed any interest in following any kind of similar career path to you? Are they going to completely stiff-arm that and reject it? What’s that conversation been like?
[00:24:28] Oji Udezue: Well, I’ll tell you, my dad was a civil engineer and I didn’t want anything to do with that. Nothing. Absolutely zilch. I think the direct answer is no, they’re not interested in doing anything we do.
The more complicated answer is that children tend to individuate. They want to be distinct from you — the strongest children. And so most of them will avoid your path, maybe initially, unless you force them.
Now, I know some kids who think, “Oh, Mom is the coolest thing and I’m going to be a doctor like she is.” For some reason, that doesn’t show up in my family. It doesn’t show up.
So no, they all want to do different interesting things. I think they understand what we do, and maybe understand its utility. So lots of kids boomerang. But at this stage it’s difficult to say, “Yeah, I want to do exactly what my old man did.” I think I didn’t want to do it, so I’d have been surprised if that happened.
[00:25:32] Adam Fishman: Maybe one of your kids will become a civil engineering. Complete the circle though. Who knows?
[00:25:35] Oji Udezue: Hey, it happens all the time because the thing is that these proclivities are sometimes in DNA and familial socialization, and so your resistance, my resistance to my dad was just pure rebellion, but the proclivity stays and then the next kid didn’t see my dad and he’s like, eh, that’s the thing I want to do.
[00:26:00] Adam Fishman: Makes sense. I’m curious what you and your wife have done to really maintain relationships and manage relationships either with each other or with your kids as you’ve been really busy with work and traveling and all that type of stuff. Do you have any routines or rituals that you try to adhere to?
[00:26:21] Oji Udezue: My wife is much better at routine, so we’ve tried to maintain family devotion times three years. We spend time together when we can on vacation and stuff like that. Before they became full fledged business people with their own schedules, we would have meals together and stuff like that, but everyone has their own calendar now, so it’s difficult. Well, I think the most important thing is just make time for conversation. For the longest time we would do breakfast on Saturdays together. It wasn’t always the most chill time because we’re all type A and so we can get on each other’s nerves, but I feel like people communicate sub through multiple things, body language, audio and whatever. Even some of those things, even arguments breakout and stuff, I feel like it’s still communicating. I think it’s still family time. We have a surround set of things and so that if our lives become a manageable and one thing can happen, the other thing picks it up.
[00:27:23] Adam Fishman: I have a lot of younger parents who listen to this show. Some aren’t even parents yet. I call those folks parenting curious. They’re listening to this show because they’re hoping that they might see what they look like in five or 10 or 15 years. People are having kids later. People are anxious and nervous about what having a family might do to their career, especially in a world where everybody’s talking about 9, 9, 6 working all the time and stuff like that. I’d like to know what if you were talking to a really young parent or somebody who came to you and was looking for advice on how do I make this work? Can I do it? Certainly you’re proof that you can, but I’m curious what advice you would share with somebody who’s just getting started on the journey.
[00:28:14] Oji Udezue: I would start by just trying to find out if they have clarity on why they want to be a parent. I’m a very satisfied, happy parent, but I never thought that that was a must. I never thought that I would just follow my programming and do it. I had my reasons for wanting to do it. Don’t just follow the code. Most people are oblivious in this life. There’s this quote, the circuit, the unexamined life is not worth living. So I think first of all, just be clear on why you want to do it. The instinct is to make copies of yourself and encourage people not to follow the primal instinct because 8 billion of us and parental instinct things are, I don’t find ‘em very thoughtful or worthy or purposeful. So first of all, aligning that, and I think once you get through that, then I think everything else is downhill. It doesn’t matter how old you are, it doesn’t matter how young you are.
[00:29:20] Oji Udezue: The one thing I will encourage people is, listen, 120 billion humans have lived since we started to exist 300,000 years or whatever it is, our evolutionary timeline, and most of them had children and they got through it. So you will get through it. You will not be the failure out of 120 billion humans who procreated, and so don’t be afraid. The skills to do it are built into you. Now, the skills to do it in a technological society where people obsessed with other people’s opinions themselves might not be there, but the base skills are there for sure. They’re in your limbic system, not in your cerebellum, and then the rest you can figure out how much money you have. I mean, there are people in Thailand who are poor, who have four kids and the kids feel loved. They don’t have everything, but the kids feel loved, supported, surrounded by their parents. If they can do it, why can’t you?
[00:30:24] Adam Fishman: Those two things are really great. This idea that it all starts with the clarity on why you want a family in the first place and what are the reasons that you’re doing this, and then once you’ve got that clarity, take the plunge. You can do it. Like you said, the odds are in your favor, especially in a modern society that we live in.
[00:30:49] Oji Udezue: This is the best possible time. I think the one little net is raising kids in America is particularly expensive, the most expensive place, but other than that, we live at the best possible time to be a parent.
[00:31:03] Adam Fishman: We talked about the 10,000 hours of independent decisions, which I absolutely love. There’s a few other ones that you’ve got. The first one, a lot of people will probably understand this if they’ve taken a flight, but put the mask on your face first. What does that mean in the context of parenting outside of an airplane,
[00:31:22] Oji Udezue: When you’re a plane, if there’s emergency, they say, look, even if you have a kid, put the thing on your nose first, and the reason they’re saying that is that to help your kid, you need air. If you don’t have air, you can’t help them. You are helping them. They can’t pull the mask down. You die. They die. So as a parent, you should be sacrificial with your children, I think, and your spouse, but you should make space for your own living. If you kill yourself to make a living or to whatever, if you die, they die. So look after yourself too. Looking after yourself is looking after your children. The common myth is this, too much rhetoric about giving up your entire life. I don’t believe it. I think you give up your entire life, you die even if it’s not physically, and then you become worthless. You become mean, you become resentful, and all those things affect the trajectory of your children and the amount of security they feel. They see everything they can absorb the fact that you are tired, mean and resentful, so make room for your life. Your life continues. Your parentage doesn’t abort it. Look after yourself too and prioritize and if you’re healthy, they’ll be healthy.
[00:32:41] Adam Fishman: What are some of the ways that you’ve done that for yourself?
[00:32:46] Oji Udezue: There’s small and big things. My wife and I will take a vacation, just us and then we’ll call grandma to look after the children. Some people can’t countenance that. They got to have them all the time like luggage because somehow it’s evil. If you do that, it’s selfish. No, it’s not. My kids are older now, so sometimes I need to go pick ‘em up 30 minutes away and if I have something to do, I’m tired. I might say, Hey, take an Uber. Come back home. I’m not going to run myself ragged. You might feel better that I picked you up, but I am absolutely shattered. And then when I pick you up, I get there and I get resentful. I yell at you, we get whatever. Let’s not. The ability to meditate and understand self-regulate where you are is important and just check in. Check in with yourself and regulate how much energy you’re giving to parenting and when it’s tilting on the side of loss for you, and then problem solve for that.
[00:33:51] Adam Fishman: I really like coming back to the very beginning of this, what you said about you can’t help your kids if you don’t have your own oxygen, and so thinking about what it is that gives you that oxygen versus fully depleting yourself just so your kid doesn’t have to walk home from the place that’s a little farther than they’d like to walk or something like that, these things add up, so it’s a really good
[00:34:17] Oji Udezue: Principle. And look, this is not an excuse for selfishness. That’s not what it is. It’s not an excuse for egoism, it’s just a plea for making space for yourself.
[00:34:28] Adam Fishman: Yeah. A second framework that you have or principle is this idea that kids are expanders and adapters. You described this to me as they can do this for anything, so what does it mean that kids are expanders and adapters?
[00:34:43] Oji Udezue: I’m going to use a pretty extreme example just as an example through some of the conflict in say the Congo, some of the warlords would recruit children or even the conflict in Iraq, right? Some kids would plant IEDs because they were not seen as threats, but in the Congo for example, returning to that, people would raise because it was the massacred their parents and they didn’t want to kill the kids. They would recruit the kids into armies and these kids would learn at 10 or younger to wield machetes to kill adults or to shoot them. Now think about that. Just forget the horror of it or think about the physiology and the psychology of it. Some person called those kids to a purpose that no kid should do, but they rose to the occasion, and so kids are expanders to mean that there is no normal kids will do what you ask of them.
[00:35:49] Oji Udezue: If you set the by heart because of the way that we are wired, the way they look to us for care, surely early on they will try to exceed that bar because to them that’s normal. How it shows up in our lives is I call my kids to much higher bars constantly. I never did baby speak to the children. I spoke to them like adults. Even when they couldn’t speak, I still spoke to them like adults and when they could, they said to speak like adults, so if you talk to my kids now, the thing you’re going to walk away with is like, holy shit, they sound so mature, but it’s a lifetime of the principle of calling them up to that thinking. If they’re very complicated ideas, we will argue about the complicated ideas, whether it’s physics or quantum physics or philosophy and so on and so forth. And they don’t know that they shouldn’t know that shit. Yeah, no, they don’t know. They have no idea. They’re like, oh yeah, everybody, Tom down the street. That’s how his dad talks. He doesn’t, but it’s a behavioral and societal trick you can use to expand the repertoire of your children, and this cuts across the board, by the way, it’s language is behavioral, it’s education. Sometimes it’s sports and physicality, although that’s grounded by a body that can do that, you should use that. It’s a superpower they have.
[00:37:20] Adam Fishman: It sounds like you’re saying, put it another way. Kids will rise to the expectation that you have.
[00:37:27] Oji Udezue: They will rise to any expectation you set, and so raise the expectations.
[00:37:34] Adam Fishman: The last framework I want to talk about is the idea of a parent as a shepherd and not an owner. Other people maybe have described this as being a gardener. I think this is similar to that, but tell me about parents as shepherds and not owners.
[00:37:49] Oji Udezue: Yeah, I think it’s the same idea, but I’ll use my own words. I believe that children are a universe in themselves like a bubble of potential, and I don’t want to use mystical words, so a bubble of potential. If you want to be mystical, say a bubble of destiny, it’s just embryonic. Their purpose is bigger than your parentage. You don’t own it. It’s bigger than you. Your job is to bring it to fruition, and that’s what a shepherd is. A shepherd leaves a flock and in the context of parenting, it’s not to the slaughter eventually, but it is to lead to a destination you don’t know. They don’t know, and so that uncertainty should also cause caution but also respect, and this is why you respect your children, not because they’re old, but because you respect what they will become. I think this is very, very helpful.
[00:38:47] Oji Udezue: It’s very, very helpful, and it’s helpful for me. It prevents obsession. It makes me able to impose a 10,000 hours. It makes me able to put the oxygen on my face. This one’s a very critical one. It helps you expand them. It helps you make the trade off that says that going off to college is a required step. I’m not necessarily going to cry about it When they get rebellious in their teens, you put that in context and say they are pulling away and that’s a necessary process to fulfill their destiny. It helps you put so much that people struggle with in context and that helps your mind and you can be better parent. So that’s it, but it also means certain things that are actually useful for you. Parents sometimes feel so possessive. He’s an expression, his name is junior, he’s the third. That’s not useful because if you do some of those things, you constrain them. I purposely didn’t name my child after my name because I feel like I’m a lot to take already.
[00:39:48] Oji Udezue: I’m like, I’m already a big presence when I walk into room. Imagine living with me and I want to live room for them to grow, to develop outside my shade. But the good thing is it means that if they become a robes scholar, an athlete and the president, you should be proud of them, but you shouldn’t be like, oh yeah, I was responsible for that. No, man, it wasn’t. It was the audacity that was responsible for that. And in fact, one of the side effects of this principle is that I tell my kids all the time that they should be proud of themselves, not that I’m proud of. I first say, you should be proud of yourself. You did this, and then I say, I’m proud of you. There’s a sequence to it because they should start to gain confidence in the expression of their purpose, the expression of what they’re learning, but it also means the flip side, which is if they become a crackhead and they go to prison and you try your best, it’s not your fault either. It goes both ways.
[00:40:52] Adam Fishman: This is true, but I like thinking that is you don’t own your kids, they’re a ball of potential energy and you just kind of have to help steer them a little bit.
[00:41:04] Oji Udezue: Yeah, you use your experience and the experience of people you’ve learned to give it the best chance of the sum.
[00:41:11] Adam Fishman: Alright, well we’ve got a few more questions before we get to our lightning round. This is a fun one and I wish we had your wife on the show for this one because she might keep you in check. You and her have been parenting now for 17 years. You got a 17-year-old. What’s something that you and your wife still don’t agree on when it comes to parenting?
[00:41:32] Oji Udezue: I don’t think it’s so much of what we disagree on. I think it’s what we’re used to. My wife and I are not raised by the same parents and the same lineage or whatever you want to call it, and so different things feel normal to us. If I’m raised by violent parents, I think yelling is normal and so I will yell that’s the prototype you have and it’s someone who’s raised with people who are super gentle care about their feelings would be like, what the fuck are you doing? Don’t do that. So I think that there are mismatches in the way we were raised and it shows up and then we have to talk through it to create our own reality first, acknowledge our differences will also then create what we will use to go forward. And so some of the things that show up is my wife cries harmony a lot more than I do. I’m low to medium harmony, she’s like medium to high, and so I’ll often do things even though they cause stress and unhappiness today, if I think that there will cause that the opposite will happen tomorrow and I think that much more she will like to have both harmony today and the benefit tomorrow, and this is just a difference. I learn from her all the time about how to prize that thing because there’s value in it and I think she learns from me how to decide when this is not always going to prioritize.
[00:42:59] Adam Fishman: Okay. I love that. I love harmony is a really good example. Okay, last couple questions for you are around a bit of technology focus. So we’ve avoided that for most of this conversation, but both of you are steeped in technology. Your entire career has been that you’re surrounded by it, probably where you live and things like that. How have you worked maybe as a shepherd in this case to help shape the views on technology that your kids have or in your house or the sort of standards and expectations that you have there?
[00:43:36] Oji Udezue: I don’t know actually. I think that they absorb attitudes. For us, it’s livelihood. We talk to ‘em all the time about technology as a tool, and the thing about tools is that they have to be understood. They have to be practiced and they have to wield it. And what we don’t want is for you to opt out. We like control in my family, we tried to not let the world happen to us. We try to happen to the world. So that means that you have to take hold of things and try to shape them whenever you can. Like most people, they pre silently appreciably don’t trust artificial intelligence because they understand it. It’ll reshape in their gut, they understand it. It’ll reshape society in ways that since they don’t have control in ways that they can’t control. But what we’re trying to impress on them is that as and I grew up in a time when the PC revolution was new, the internet revolution was new, and our focus was like, shit, how can we put our imprint on these things up here? My patents are an effort to put an imprint on these things, and that’s what we encourage is it is just a tool. The human society shows that it is just a way for us to do more work with less energy, and so you have to be able to do the same thing.
[00:45:01] Adam Fishman: You brush brought up AI and that your kids hate it, or at least today they probably haven’t quite yet learned how to wield it appropriately. But you’ve been spending a ton of time with AI and I think all good product builders are right now and it’s uncomfortable for some people, but what’s the most interesting or creative or helpful use of AI you’ve found as a parent?
[00:45:27] Oji Udezue: Yeah, I suck at planning, man. We’ve lived in Austin for a bit and we haven’t explored it, so I recently started asking Chad GPI to tell me what to do on the weekend so that we’re not all just sitting here chilling out and venting out because we had a difficult week. My kids are doing a little writing for idol poetry or essays or whatever. It’s nonstop. If they ask my opinion sometimes and like, oh, what’s your take on this thing? Sometimes I’ll say it needs to sound more confident, but instead doing that, I will put it into and say, Hey, punch this up so it sounds a little more bold and it’s easy. They never take my draft anyway, so I just want to show them an example.
[00:46:11] Adam Fishman: Yeah, yeah. No, that’s good.
[00:46:14] Oji Udezue: There are fun things like images. There’s a lot of dead images on your phone and sometimes we try to do the throwback in a family chat I message and either the real picture or a funny version of it using nano banana. But I think most of the stuff around AI is just preparing them for how to think about it. One of the things I’m trying to do is prepare product managers about how the world will change, how the work they do will change because of ai, and I want to do the same for my children. No one knows what profession they should ask their kids to do. How do you know the world we’re about to enter is very different from the world we lived in, and so you have to parent to the future. We don’t have a map, so it’s like how to think about it. Fundamentally, I tinker a lot with technology and some of it is actually pretty cool. I don’t know what it’s doing to them, but I think that it fills them with possibility, what’s possible in a way that their peers won’t even know for decades. For a decade they live on the frontier just by being around me all the time. I just built a PC with my son and this was the third or fourth we built together, that kind of thing.
[00:47:25] Adam Fishman: Awesome. I love that. Reminds me of my childhood. Okay. Wanted to end and ask you about the concept of lateral thinking. You’ve applied this quite successfully. In your professional context, how does this fit into your parenting style or what you’re teaching your kids?
[00:47:44] Oji Udezue: The three things that animate me personally, I think, I mean, I dunno, it might change, but it’s like originality, creativity, and wisdom. I always try to bring new things into the world. New thought, new philosophy, new framework. I want them to be really creative, new or remixes on what’s out there, good remixes. So I think you can encapsulate that into lateral thinking is taking the information in front of you and just thinking about different ways it can be remixed, different applications for it, and I think the way that that comes into my family is expressing that lateral thinking, make it funny or just make it cogent. When I do that enough, my family gets used to examining ideas in different words, maybe in ways that they don’t see anywhere else. My daughter is a great lateral thinker and my wife, every time they think differently, oh by the way, this is another part I reward with acknowledgement, like lateral thinking in the family, so it reinforces it. So my wife, I’ll be puzzling something out and she’ll just like, boom, solve it and I’ll be like, oh, I just hail her. I’d be like, my God. Look at that brain
[00:49:11] Adam Fishman: To end. How can people follow along or be helpful to you on your journey?
[00:49:17] Oji Udezue: Well, first of all, I have a book here called Building Rocket Ships. If you’re a builder, you need all the help you can get. I like the idea that it takes a thousand good decisions to build something valuable like a company, and this is going to take away 500 of those things that you got to make, so you should get it. You can find me on Substack Product Mind on Substack. I’m sure you’ll find it very quickly. A website is product mind cl as well. So yeah, get the book, follow us on Substack, check out our website. I’m doing lots of exciting things and I’m very, very intentional about giving back, so I’m creating a community of builders and startup people as well. Slowly not because then I have to, but because I want to help people and so consider joining one of those.
[00:50:07] Adam Fishman: Great. Well, I will definitely be buying a copy of the book and we’ll link to all of the places that people can buy it or find you in the show notes, so thank you. Do you have a couple of minutes for lightning round?
[00:50:19] Oji Udezue: Yeah, I do. Let’s do it.
[00:50:21] Adam Fishman: Let’s get started. What is the most indispensable parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:50:28] Oji Udezue: I think maybe, probably just the Amazon Echo.
[00:50:32] Adam Fishman: Oh, nice. Okay. What is the most useless parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:50:38] Oji Udezue: Oh my God. Parents have preyed. All your kids are babies. There’s all kinds of crap you buy.
[00:50:44] Adam Fishman: Yeah,
[00:50:44] Oji Udezue: I can’t remember what it is. It’s probably in that era.
[00:50:47] Adam Fishman: We call it the Parenting Industrial Complex. That’s right. It’s
[00:50:50] Oji Udezue: There. That’s right.
[00:50:51] Adam Fishman: Okay. True or false, there’s only one correct way to load the dishwasher?
[00:50:56] Oji Udezue: No. Come on. Lateral thinker here.
[00:50:59] Adam Fishman: I don’t believe that. I should have known. I should have known. Okay. Across 17 years of raising kids, what is your least favorite parenting task?
[00:51:10] Oji Udezue: Correction.
[00:51:11] Adam Fishman: Okay. If your kids had to describe you in one word, what would it be?
[00:51:17] Oji Udezue: I have no clue.
[00:51:21] Adam Fishman: Awesome. How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?
[00:51:28] Oji Udezue: Probably 0.1. I’m not a very funny person and I don’t feel the des entertained.
[00:51:36] Adam Fishman: Okay. The best part about Dad jokes is that they’re not actually funny, so Okay. What would your teenagers say is the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done in front of them?
[00:51:49] Oji Udezue: Maybe like dance in public.
[00:51:53] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[00:51:54] Oji Udezue: Yeah. They’re like, where did that come from? Yeah. This is not the man we know. He must be high.
[00:52:02] Adam Fishman: What is your favorite kids movie?
[00:52:06] Oji Udezue: Big Hero six.
[00:52:07] Adam Fishman: Oh, I love that movie too. That’s a great
[00:52:09] Oji Udezue: One.
[00:52:10] Adam Fishman: First time it’s come up on this pod though. Okay. What was the first nostalgic movie that you forced your kids to watch when they were old enough?
[00:52:20] Oji Udezue: None yet.
[00:52:21] Adam Fishman: No, actually. Wow. You got to get on that. Okay, two more for you. How often do you tell your kids back in my day stories
[00:52:30] Oji Udezue: As little as possible.
[00:52:32] Adam Fishman: It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle. And finally, probably not so relevant anymore, but what is your take on minivans?
[00:52:41] Oji Udezue: The spawn of the devil.
[00:52:44] Adam Fishman: Are you and your wife in violent agreement on that one?
[00:52:48] Oji Udezue: Yes.
[00:52:49] Adam Fishman: Okay, good to know.
[00:52:50] Oji Udezue: Although, lemme tell you a funny story, right?
[00:52:52] Adam Fishman: Yes, please do.
[00:52:53] Oji Udezue: We were resisting me spearheading this resistance, the score of minivans when they were the age where they needed to be car around, and so I searched high and low for a car, so I got a three-year-old SUV. I won’t say what model because I don’t like identifiable information in these things. I get it, but after driving it for a year, just it hit me. I’m like, damn, this is just a camouflage vac. Anyway, they got me, man. If you just change a few things, it is just exactly a mini event, so I’m like, you can’t get away. You can’t do it.
[00:53:30] Adam Fishman: Can’t escape it. The poll is everywhere. Alright, well Aji, thank you so much for joining me today on Startup Dad. This was a really fun conversation. I laughed a lot. I don’t know, you said you’re not that big into humor, but I mean
[00:53:46] Oji Udezue: This
[00:53:46] Adam Fishman: Is great.
[00:53:47] Oji Udezue: No, I’m into humor. I’m not giving, delivering.
[00:53:48] Adam Fishman: Oh, you’re not good at delivering.
[00:53:50] Oji Udezue: Okay. I go to comedy shows all the time,
[00:53:52] Adam Fishman: But
[00:53:53] Oji Udezue: I don’t think I’m particularly funny.
[00:53:54] Adam Fishman: Well, hey, I do after this conversation, so thank you and thank you for all the time that you spent on this, and then best of luck to you and your wife and your kids on your journey through life.
[00:54:08] Oji Udezue: Alright. Thank you so much, Adam. I really appreciate this. This is different and I hope your audience enjoys it.
[00:54:14] Adam Fishman: I think they will. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today’s episode with OG Esue. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.