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David McElroy

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Wealthy CEO walks away from millions after daughter’s challenge

By David McElroy · October 7, 2014

Mohamed El-Erian

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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Tyler Barnes will never be a basketball star. He probably peaked as a star high school player in Louisville, Ky. But for the last four years, he’s been a walk-on player for the University of Alabama. He’s a chemical engineering major with lots of academic honors who rides the bench because he loves being part of a team. He sometimes gets into games with a minute or two to go, but only if Alabama has a big lead. This Saturday, it was senior day for Alabama basketball, so it was his last chance to play in Coleman Coliseum. Alabama Coach Nate Oats says that one of the team starter’s came to him an hour before the game started — and fellow senior Alex Reese asked Oats if Barnes could start in his place for this one game. Even though the game was huge for Alabama, which is ranked No. 6 in the country and trying to wrap up an SEC title, Oats agreed. Barnes started and played the first three minutes, grabbing what was only the fourth rebound of his career and missing his only shot. Barnes has a great future as an engineer, but you’ll never again hear from him as a basketball player. For three shining minutes Saturday, though, he was a starter for a top-10 college basketball team — and his parents were in the stands from Kentucky to see it. There’s a lot of ugliness in college basketball right now, but this story makes me happy.

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

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