Successful CEO walks away from job after daughter’s challenge

By David McElroy · October 7, 2014

It’s easy to say you care about your spouse and children, but words are empty compared to actions. Earlier this year, a California multimillionaire was forced to decide what was most important to him in life.

Mohamed El-Erian was CEO of a $2-trillion investment firm called PIMCO. He’s a very successful and hard-driving businessman who has made a lot of money. In 2011 alone, his income was $200 million. But he shocked the financial world in January when he quit his job — not to jump to a rival firm, but to spend time with his wife and daughter.

We can all learn something from his choice.

El-Erian was forced to decide what was most important to him — his family or his income — because his daughter challenged him. Writing for Worth magazine in May, El-Erian explained his crisis of values.

He said he asked his daughter to do something — which he recalls as brushing her teeth — and the two ended up arguing about her lack of compliance. He reminded her that she had always been quick to obey him, but she asked him to wait a minute, then she disappeared briefly to get a piece of paper from her room.

“It was a list that she had compiled of her important events and activities that I had missed due to work commitments,” El-Erian wrote. “The list contained 22 items, from her first day at school and first soccer match of the season to a parent-teacher meeting and a Halloween parade.

“I felt awful and got defensive: I had a good excuse for each missed event! Travel, important meetings, an urgent phone call, sudden to-do. But it dawned on me that I was missing an infinitely more important point. As much as I could rationalize it — as I had rationalized it — my work-life balance had gotten way out of whack, and the imbalance was hurting my very special relationship with my daughter. I was not making nearly enough time for her.”

After he realized this and thought about it, El-Erian made a decision. He quit his job to restructure his life and spend time with his family.

“Earlier this year, I left behind the privilege and intellectual stimulation of working with extremely talented colleagues and friends at PIMCO and instead opted for a portfolio of part-time jobs that requires a lot less travel and offers a ton more flexibility — enough, I hope, to allow me to experience with my daughter more of those big and little moments that make up each day,” El-Erian wrote.

Today, El-Erian says he and his wife alternate days waking their daughter up, preparing her breakfast and taking her to school. He says the decision was the right one for him.

It’s easy to look at someone such as El-Erian and think it would be easy to make such a decision when faced with a clear alternative, especially for someone who already has millions of dollars in the bank. It’s easy to make excuses about why we wouldn’t have the luxury of making that decision. What’s more, it’s easy to make excuses that our lives are “in balance” when we don’t have a young child presenting her list of things we’ve missed in her life.

El-Erian faced one big moment of decision, but for most of us, it’s never one big decision. It’s a series of hundreds or thousands of small decisions.

It’s the decision that spending time at work is more important than being home to put your child to bed. It’s the decision that it’s more important to have a higher-paying job that requires you to spend time out of town while your child wakes up in the morning with just one parent. It’s the decision that being at your child’s baseball game isn’t that big a deal. It’s the decision that it’s more important to spend time with friends than to spend time with your spouse and children.

Each time you make such a decision, it’s justifiable. You have to make a living. You want to succeed and make money in order to take care of your family. You work hard, so you deserve “play time” with your friends. Every one of the decisions makes sense on some level. It’s all a trade-off. Your spouse must understand. In time, your children will understand. Right?

In his book, “Investment Biker,” Wall Street guru Jim Rogers discussed the tradeoffs involved in pursuing the things you want in life.

“Most of us don’t have the discipline to stay focused on a single goal for five, 10 or 20 years, giving up everything to bring it off, but that’s what’s necessary to become an Olympic champion, a world-class surgeon, or a Kirov ballerina,” Rogers wrote. “Even then, of course, it may be all in vain. You may make a single mistake that wipes out all the work. It may ruin the sweet, lovable self you were at 17. That old adage is true: You can do anything in life, you just can’t do everything. That’s what Bacon meant when he said a wife and children were hostages to fortune. If you put them first, you probably won’t run the three-and-a-half-minute-mile, make your first $10 million, write the great American novel or go around the world on a motorcycle. Such goals take complete dedication.”

I love Rogers’ quote, but I apply it in a very different way than many people do. To most people, it means that you should pursue your goal single-handedly instead of being tied down to a spouse and children. That’s a very valid conclusion if you have a goal that’s more important than the love of your family, but I have a different way of looking at it.

If you want a family — and if you claim they’re important to you — don’t pursue some goal that requires giving up so much of your time and effort. You can’t reasonably have both. You have to decide which is really important.

There are some big things I’d love to pursue and there have been times in my life when I thought they were important. But I’ve realized that nothing matters more to me than having the love of a wife and children. I want time with them. I want my children to grow up spending constant time with me and to know that I love them just as much as their mother does.

That limits my options, but it’s not a bad thing. It’s simply a test of my values. Do I value a life of success and money more than I value my family? Or are the people I love hold the position of importance in my life?

I need a wife who agrees with me that it’s worth having a more modest life — if necessary — in order for us both to spend time with each other and our children. That’s what is most important to me. If money or some other goal is more important to you, there’s nothing wrong with that, but understand you almost certainly can’t be the parent you need to be if you’re maximizing your income through that kind of career success.

Either choice is acceptable, but understand that it’s a choice. It’s a trade-off. If you try to have both, you’re not going to be very good at either one.

I know which sacrifices I’m willing to make for my future family — because I never want to face a child handing me an accusing list of things I’ve missed in her life.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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