I got a troubling email the other day, a response from a former student to my post Monday, the one where my wife said we’ll risk it together. This was from a man who was one of the most likable students I’ve ever taught, a hard worker, an achiever who I expect to be running for public office some day (and in this case I mean that in a good way).

Referring to that post, here’s what he said:

I was wondering, would you have still left your job and ventured out on your own if your wife was absolutely unsupportive and opposed to the idea?  And how did her words help you? I hope I am not asking questions that are too personal, but my situation is similar to yours, except my wife is the exact opposite of yours.

That email came a couple of days ago, but I had to think about it. And I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have left that job, back then, if my wife had objected.

I know, my answer sort of spoils the story, and the rah-rah of entrepreneurship, the idea that we follow our passion and overcome all obstacles. But it’s the truth. Businesses fail, and it’s naive of us to forget that sometimes they fail despite our best efforts. Sometimes the reluctant spouse is just plain right. Sometimes the failure to get investment, the obstacles that accumulate, are a message.

And, looking at it realistically, there’s no denying, like it or not, that a spouse who doesn’t buy into the dream adds to the risk. You don’t want to throw the family into the mix. Plan more, research more, and either answer the objections or, heaven forbid, accept that the world is sending you a clue.

This is a tough question, obviously. Every case is different. But we do glorify the entrepreneurial a bit too much, and we glaze over some of the risks involved. Sometimes.

I have a very good friend   who moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Atlanta when he got his lifetime dream job. It was exactly what he’d prepared for, in the segment he’d worked in, but with much more responsibility and a lot more money.

When he was back six months later, the obvious question was: "What happened?"

"Well," he answered, "I guess the thing is that it’s much easier to get a new job than a new wife."

And, by the way, I switched the word "wife" to "spouse" for the title of this post, because I think the situation is gender neutral. This is about relationships, not specifically wives. It could have been she, and her husband, and it would be the same.

I’ve realized lately that for most of my adult life I’ve gone through some wide slow swings from morning person to night person.  I swing back and forth sometimes for as much as 2-3 years, sometimes just a few months.

As a morning person, I’m generally more productive.

As a night person, I’m generally more creative.

And if I try to be both –staying up late working, and then also getting up early for working — I’m told I’m a royal pain to all around me. So apparently I’m better off  being either morning or night, but not both.

The generally accepted dad style has changed a lot during my lifetime. I’ve witnessed a steady change, an evolution towards a different kind of fatherhood parenting. And I think the new way is a lot better, for reasons that might surprise you. Not just because dads that I see are sharing more of the load than dads (including me) used to, which seems better and fairer; but also because (hear me out on this one) I think it’s better for the dads and — of course — the kids.

And this post is going to be personal. Fair warning given.

Born in 1948, I grew up in the 1950s world that television stylized by inventing the "housewife," who could be made deliriously happy by clothes coming out of a washing machine whiter than white. She wore poodle skirts and high heels while cheerily doing dishes. She was there to meet the kids coming home from school.

My parents both respected the 1950s concept of the breadwinner. What that meant, to give you a specific example, was that when dinner ended the mom and (in our house) four kids stayed in the kitchen to clear the table and do the dishes. There were four of us kids, three boys and a girl, and our mom divided the chores among us as much as she could.

Our 1950s dad was an active dad, a loving dad, the best there was. He’s 88 now, still a man I admire very much, and a role model of the professional (he was an MD until he retired) who is also a father. He was involved in all the key decisions. He was home on weekends, and he pulled us into his favorite activities, including a lot of active sports, a lot of spectator sports and (we always hated it) long sunny weekends outside doing the garden. We planted trees. We watered. Dad was usually there, rarely just supervising; and he never supervised while staying inside watching TV. If he wasn’t there with the yard work, he was working. He took us to football games, basketball games, and baseball games. He even took us to the 1962 World Series. He taught us to play football and basketball and baseball too, and coached the little league baseball team.

But, even as  medical doctor, meaning he knew where things were and how things worked, my 1950s dad as I knew him was not a dad who would change diapers, or drive a kid to baseball practice during the work day, or attend a parent-teacher conference that wasn’t vital, like when one of us was in serious trouble and the school demanded both parents (happened rarely, but happened). I was the second, just 17 months younger than the oldest so maybe he did that in the beginning but not with the younger ones, who came six and 10 years after me. And he never cooked, and he never did the dishes, and he didn’t help with the housework.

He was the breadwinner. Our mom made that position clear.

Fast forward a generation, to dadding (daddom? fatherhood is so stilted) in the 1970s.

I was a foreign correspondent in Mexico City in my 20s when we had three kids quickly, from July of ’72 to October of ’75. I like to think (memories are deceptive, and my picture, frankly, is different from my wife’s) I was a pretty good 1970s dad. When we had three little ones running around, I remember giving people bottles and changing diapers. But my wife remembers doing that pretty much all by herself, maybe with a lot of help from her mother (one of my all-time favorite people).

And how do I reconcile my memory with hers (we are still married, by the way, all these years later)? I go to the facts: in those years I pretty much got up before dawn, ran, and drove to the office before 7 a.m. because traffic was so bad in Mexico City (or maybe because I like the early mornings, or perhaps to avoid the morning chaos of a house with three young kids, but I blamed it on traffic). And I rarely got home before 8 p.m. (traffic was really bad between 4 and 7 p.m.). And I worked a lot of weekends, doing freelance stories for different publications, even writing travel brochures for the Mexican government (we were always broke). So I guess my memories of being an active dad in Mexico City were for the two and maybe three weekends that I was with the family all day Saturday and Sunday. Which would make my wife’s memories (she uses the "I" word a lot in the context of raising kids) more accurate than mine.

But then let’s fast forward again — I think this makes it more interesting — but this time only half a generation. Our fourth was born in 1982, after we had moved back from Mexico to the United States, and after I’d gone back to school for two years to get the MBA degree. And our fifth was born in 1987. We had just cashed out on my founders equity in Borland International, so for once we weren’t broke (although that didn’t last long, as Palo Alto Software started to suck up our assets, but that’s a different post).

And then, in the 1980s, I discovered what I’d been missing. I was home a lot more. I ran my consulting business (which became Palo Alto Software later) out of a home office from 1983 to 1987. I took care of our toddler daughter (not by any means the primary — my wife would kill me — but way more than I had in the 1970s when the first group of three were little. My wife’s mother was in Mexico City, we were in the U.S., so she couldn’t take up the slack I left, the way she always had. And with four and then five kids, my wife had an enormous job, which meant that like it or not, custom or not, I became way more active than I’d been 10 years earlier.

And with that I discovered what I’d been missing. I gave the 2 a.m. bottle to our fourth almost every night for more than a year. I got involved with bathing and feeding and all of that. I was almost always back-up, my wife still did the real work, but I was a lot more there. And I discovered that when dads put in quantity time with kids, they get way more back than what they put in. Over time, it became clear to me that I had missed so much with the first three that I was grateful that I had a chance to catch on for the last two. Because it’s been my experience that the biggest winner in my sudden increase in dad involvement was me. The dad.

I think before I go on I should set the record straight. I wasn’t, even in my reformed dad self of the 1980s and 1990s, like the more involved dads of today. I was still pretty much focused on work — we raised those kids with my consulting income, I was nobody’s employee, so there was a lot of pressure. And my wife cooperated to make sure that when work was needed, I was free to stay focused on work. I traveled a lot in Latin America while consulting for Apple Latin America, and got over to the Far East for several computer companies. At one stretch of four years I spent one week per month in Tokyo. And my wife, rather than insisting on full half and half participation or anything like that, kept my world clear for the work that I had to do. She still gets to say "I" when she talks about raising kids.

Still, I also coached the kids’ soccer for about eight straight years, and I made a lot of parent teacher conferences, and I was there a lot more. And nobody gained as much as I did.

Fast forward again. To today.

I’m watching it today with another generation. Having three children born between ’72 and ’75, if you do the math, it’s not surprising that we now have grandchildren: five of them, the oldest is four years old. And their dads seem to be far more involved with them than I was even with those more recent ones. And I, meanwhile, am seeing again, with a new generation, that the more quantity time these dads get with these kids, the better off they are.

It’s not just a matter of sharing the work. The more they do of that work, the better off they are. Strange math — the more you give, the more you have — but I think that’s what I’ve seen in evolving dad styles over three generations.

As a parent to five kids I’ve seen — enjoyed and endured — more graduation speeches, I suspect, than most people. Actually, not counting my own, or my siblings’, that’s five high school graduations and four college graduations, and still counting.

The most memorable of those was the 1994 class of South Eugene High School, here in Eugene Oregon, for which the speaker was Ken Kesey, author of Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who read from an unpublished short story.

The graduation speech is an interesting moment. To some, it’s a chance to be heard, a moment of a lifetime. Some of these speeches — for example, Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005 — are so good that they get major play on the Web for a while (although it’s frustrating, because they seem to get taken off from YouTube, leaving just the spot where they once were. The Steve Jobs video is linked from lots of places, but ends up in a dead end, although you can click here for the text transcript).

To the graduating students, however, graduation speeches are … well, is this a useful avenue for further discussion? After all, they’re young, they’ve already started partying, it’s hot, they have to sit still, and they’re (repetition is on purpose) young.

I also heard then-President Bill Clinton speak at the 1996 Princeton graduation, Condoleezza Rice at the 1995 Notre Dame graduation, and Dustin Hoffman at the 2005 Tisch School of Arts at NYU graduation.

Dustin Hoffman took a very engaging trip through his memories of a career in acting, a great speech for students at Tisch, which is known for its production of actors, musicians, and dancers. At one point he talked about he and two guys named Gene and Bob shared a very low rent apartment in the Alphabet City area of lower Manhattan, an extremely tough neighborhood at the time, struggling with menial jobs while trying to get acting parts. He told the story well, leaving out, to use as a punch line, that Gene and Bob were Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall. So that one cheap apartment in New York produced how many Academy Award winners?

President Clinton introduced a new program for helping families pay for education at the Princeton graduation. The most interesting part of that speech was the five minutes he did in Latin. It included jokes in Latin. And, amazingly, students laughed at the jokes in Latin. I learned later that the classics department had prepped the students ahead of time, so the laughs were planned.

Yesterday, Sunday, browsing the Web, I discovered the graduation speech I wish I’d heard, titled Hindsights, which Guy Kawasaki has delivered three times to Palo Alto High School, and a few times in other places. He put it on his blog so you and I can read it. And it’s June, so the time is right. 

Just to give you an idea, it’s based on a top 10 list and starts with the following as number 10:

#10: Live off your parents as long as possible. 

I was a diligent Oriental in high school and college. I took college-level classes and earned college-level credits. I rushed through college in 3 1/2 years. I never traveled or took time off because I thought it wouldn’t prepare me for work and it would delay my graduation. 

Frankly, I blew it. 

That’s all I’m going to quote here. I suggest you follow the link, and read that speech. 

How to Change the World: Hindsights

Eli Halliwell, CEO and President of Jurlique (an Australian natural cosmetics company), tells a great story of how he followed his own path, crediting some other people and coincidence more than himself, and ended up where he believes he was always supposed to be.

He emphasizes vision; in his case, a belief in the importance of healthy, natural skin care products. He credits "hippy parents" and a friend’s father for starting him in that direction.

He spoke last Friday at the Princeton Entrepreneurs’ Network conference.

He does have an agenda. This was just 10 days after a rousing speech at an industry conference, calling for national action against unhealthy beauty products.

His talk seemed both very impressive and very real. He offered a four-point piece of advice for entrepreneurs.

1. Follow your heart. I know that sounds trite but Eli clearly made it work, telling how he’s followed concerns that led him to Jurlique — all natural beauty products, in Australia, with its own farms — all of his life. Eli is not Australian. Jurlique, as he tells the tale, is a natural point in his path. He clearly believes very much in the value of what he’s doing.
2. When everybody is running one direction, run the other way.
3. Live with a vision, build a business with a vision, and surround yourself with like-minded people who share that vision.
4. Get a mentor.

I’ve come to love the early mornings, especially when it’s still dark, but getting light. The streets are empty, and the office is empty. The coffee tastes so good at that time that I should pronounce the "so" in this sentence using three syllables. Today I was in at 6:45, which gives me almost two hours before the office really opens up. My music is loud. My thoughts are clear.

What’s particularly soothing this morning is that yesterday I finished the last of my touches on my plan-as-you-go book. I really enjoyed the process, but now I enjoy being done. I’m remembering how good it used to feel the day after school ended for the year, when I was still in school but too young for summer jobs. That was a good feeling.  And this is a good feeling too, this morning.