Discover more from Decks and Diapers
The Coffee Chat (#48)
My conversation with Jay Acunzo - Founder, CreatorKitchen.com, host of the Unthinkable podcast, 2x published author and dad to 2!
Welcome to the new subscribers who have joined us since the last post. Today this email is going out to 1016 amazing individuals!
If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, you may want to consider doing that. This will ensure future posts land straight in your inbox (and it is free!!)
Hi there 👋🏽
First off – a very happy Diwali to all those who will be celebrating. Wishing you all health, happiness and joy.
Thanks to you all I already got my Diwali gift. Kevin Kelly spoke about striving for 1,000 true fans and the fact that I have hit that on my newsletter makes me feel simultaneously surprised and special. In a world where each of you have unlimited options where you can spend your time, I am thrilled that you decided to engage with this newsletter!
Thank you for being part of this community.
Over the course of writing this newsletter I have gotten to know so many of you and reconnected with old friends and former colleagues. That to me has been the biggest highlight.
And in the spirit of helping each other, I wanted to use this forum to share the work being done by Virginia Kotzias, a Decks and Diapers reader who is currently pursing her PhD at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology studying the ways that COVID has affected infant feeding decisions. She is currently looking to speak with “moms who gave birth in the US in 2022 to learn more about how their return to work affects how they feed their babies. Moms in retail, hospitality, “gig economy” jobs, and any remote/work from home position are especially wanted.” If this is you, please use this link to sign up
☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…
Meet Jay Acunzo - one of the world’s most sought-after business storytellers!
He’s worked in marketing roles at Google, ESPN and held multiple leadership positions at high-growth tech startups, including Head of Content at HubSpot, and served as Vice President of Brand and Community at the venture capital firm NextView.
However, he realized that his true passion lies in helping other creators, create. This led to the birth of Creator Kitchen - to support business experts who want to become the most influential storytellers in their space. His grandest aspiration (and what he calls, probably delusion) is to become the Anthony Bourdain of the online creator space.
Jay is also a published author, newsletter writer and host of an award-winning podcast!
I am so thrilled that Jay very generously offered me his time and shared his reflections on parenting and work for the wonderful readers of this newsletter!
Below is my conversation with Jay…
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your family
I have a two kids. They're 4.5 and 2. We live just north of Boston and my wife and I are both very career focused parents. My wife is a psychologist and a tenure track professor at Tufts and I am an entrepreneur who came out of tech companies like Google and HubSpot, and a VC firm but now I earn a living writing books and giving speeches and developing podcasts for clients. In addition to those I also run a mastermind group called the Creator Kitchen! As a result of our love of our work, and dedication to it, it does make parenting at the younger stages even more insane. We don't live within a short drive of our family to get support and as a result we have had to rely on a network of wonderful babysitters, nannies, daycares etc. to make this work.
Similar to you, I am sort of trying to make sense of the Venn diagram overlap of ambition and parenting. I exist at that overlap. And I have not figured it out yet.
Even though you are very famous in certain corners of the internet, I first got to know you after coming across your very viral tweet storm on X (formerly called Twitter) where you talk about existing in this overlap of being a working ambitious parents and the culture that we live in and how there's this conflict there. Tell me more about this idea?
You are not really shown or told what it's really like when you become a parent and then also this new generation of young parents is coming into or entering parenting in a different world than previous generations. So there's very little context given to you or shown to you, whether it's through conversations with friends or conversations with people from previous generations. As a result, you discover a lot of things that kind of cause you to throw up your hands - is there something wrong with me? Why is it this hard? Where's the support? Why do I not know simple things? Like I didn't anticipate that wearing black T shirts was off the table for a while, because now I just get what I call yogurt shoulders from my kids. So there's little things like that which are new.
And then there are big things like why is there no free childcare before they turn five or six? Why does it start at kindergarten? and then why is that only till 3 when work needs you to be in till 5 or 6? We don’t expect adults to quit their jobs for five or six years! So how do kids get raised?
This model still persists because in the previous generations the expectation was there are two working parents but one of them didn't have a job. Spoiler alert. That was the mom, she stayed home. That was what culture expected. Right? So we're living in an era where society is struggling to catch up with the realities of parents today and what is making all this worse is that we're almost not allowed to talk about any of these hard truths. Candidly, publicly. But when you're in private, that's all we talk about. When I talk to all my friends of differing family constructions from working parents, single parents, one working parent, one parent at home, one working parent, one part time parent, people close to friends and family, people far from friends and family…. Doesn't matter who I'm talking to in all cases, when you're talking to those close to you who are going through it, you talk about how insanely hard it is.
But at the same time you feel ashamed to do so. Because your told it's a gift. It's precious. Absolutely. It's also horrifying and very, very hard. And so we need to get better at holding two truths together and create a culture where we feel allowed to talk about both of these equally, and not have to bury the hard in what you see on social media, which is humor. I appreciate parent humor, but I see it also unfortunately as the only acceptable form of being able to share with the world - hey this is hard.
That's a very interesting point - when parents make these jokes sometimes it is really is a cry for help and saying hey look my life is a complete shit show right now and the only way for me to process this and share this out in the world is through the lens of humor. The other reflection that I have and I know it's hard to ask you because you are a man but still in your observations with your friends or even conversations with your partner, do you feel like it's a lot harder for women?
So my wife was on a work trip for I think it was four days. And I was talking to an older neighbor who with all good intentions in a very warm and supportive manner told me - It's amazing that you're babysitting the kids for four days while your wife travels. And I was in the moment like smiling and saying thank you, but it pissed me off. Because I'm not babysitting. They're my kids. I'm the dad. This is my job. And I take pride in it. And I'm an equal partner in all things with their mother, my wife. We are equal partners.
But that person wasn't saying it to belittle me. They were saying it because the cultural norms that they grew up in, which really do persist today, and that is the way he and so many other especially men in leadership positions at organizations view it today. I think we undervalue just how long it takes the culture to evolve. So yes, 100% it is harder for women.
So you are a marketing guru, how does one shift culture?
I think any movement towards change starts with your immediate sphere of influence - and so that is anyone's direct neighborhood, direct network, your friends, your family, etc. and then it is paramount for a culture to change that this sphere of influence you have or that the network you have is honest with each other.
Because I think it's from a place of honesty - Hey, y'all you ever wake up thinking I'm so lucky to have these kids and I want to heat them into the sun, at the very same time? Yeah. Oh, you do too. Oh, wow. I'm not so alone. Thank you. Hey, everyone. You ever feel like as a dad, you have no sense of community, except for joke accounts. But moms actually do have a lot of areas of support they receive as moms.
Two Truths - like the entirety of my message to parents is we need to get better and there's multiple things that are both 100% Correct.
It is true that moms have it tougher, and dads have no support, because historically it wasn't a thing. And so unless you're able to start being honest, and public, I don't think the culture changes. Just being honest with what we're going through to everyone else around. It's about speaking the unspoken in a way that is actually honest, that people feel seen and people feel empowered. And now people can change or you can collect people around you to go and make changes and community
I like your whole concept of holding two contradictory truths at the same time…
It is so hard for people to do because people want life to be two things - They want life to be simple, and they want life to share ideas back to them that affirm how they view themselves and not cause them to question it.
So in wanting life to be simple - It's all one thing, it's all butterflies, rainbows and it's a gift. It's all good. But this is not true to reality even though this is what people want reality to be. Or they don't want to hear somebody else pointing out a hard truth and being honest in a way they don't feel empowered to be honest about themselves. This bother people because now they're sort of seeing a mirror and they're forced to see their own reality. They don't know how to approach their own emotions and confront those emotions or they don't have a support system. So it's a lot easier to go on the attack. Go on the offensive than to say, you know, actually, this is causing me to doubt or think differently about myself or what I assumed was how things operate. So do it but don’t expect people to love you for doing it.
So before we end, I want to touch upon what you mentioned in your introduction - you and your wife both are deeply ambitious people who care a lot about your career. Caring about your career requires time and energy and so does parenting. Time is limited, energy is limited. How have you reconciled this feeling that maybe everything that you could do or you want to do at this moment right now cannot happen?
My wife and I have started talking about making trade offs and decisions in a way that our mid 20s selves would be horrified by. If you're not spending time with your kids, you're spending time elsewhere - that's a trade off. Right now we have hit a plateau and are just trying to get through this stage of parenting two young kids.
I am someone who is always trying to get better at my craft. I'm always trying to grow my business as an entrepreneur and I do find myself actively daydreaming, which is just part and parcel of being creative, and then walking back what I'm dreaming about, because I'm like, well, but my kids are little, so I can't really do that. Or well, I'm bound to get sick, come winter 70 times. Or well, I can only really work 30 hours a week because when you have kids, your morning, night and weekend work time or self time is gone.
So the way I've tried to make sense of this all is just to try and embrace that. I'm in mud and my unhappiness comes from when I'm trying to continue being a sprinter as I've been all my life. But you can't sprint in mud. So what do you have to do? ….you have to learn to slog and you have to learn to slog gracefully, and I'm still figuring that out!!
🤓 Open tabs…
(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)
⭐How Much Control Do You Have Over Your Own Happiness?
Social conditions and inequality affect well-being. So, why do we keep insisting "happiness is a choice"?
⭐The hope and heartbreak of IVF
The Economist correspondents Catherine Brahic and Sacha Nauta tell a story about the pain, the hope and the despair that is paid for a life to be created. And a personal story about two women, over five years, whose lives followed parallel tracks in their quest for a baby.
⭐Are You Living Your Eulogy or Resume?
When people die, their eulogies celebrate life very differently from the way we define success in our everyday existence
📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…
(My X (Twitter) use has drastically gone down, I am now more active on Threads)
I would love to hear from you, feedback is always welcome!
And if you happen to know an inspiring working parent who should be featured in a future edition (or if you yourself are one) - please do get in touch
P.S. If this email landed in your Promotions tab, please take a second and drag it to your Primary tab. It makes a big difference to the inbox gods, plus you’ll never miss a post!
Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer