What is it like to be an American serial entrepreneur AND working father in Japan?

We sat down with Jim Weisser, Co-Founder and CEO at SignTime, to talk about how he makes room for his family in his life and the lessons he has learned about management from having children.

Read part 1 where we talked about SignTime and digital transformation in Japan.

Don’t feel like reading? Watch the video.

Interview with Jim Weisser Part 3

Once you’re married it may change your life, but having kids changes your lifestyle. It’s essential to be aware of who and what you want to be. As an example, there are people who measure all of their life goals in terms of money points, and they find satisfaction in that. Personally, I would find that very hollow. 

When I consider the things that I would like to be remembered for, they are often old-fashioned things. Things like he is an honest person, his word is his bond, if he says he is going to do something then he is going to do it. Other examples would be he loves his kids and he spends time with them. Things like that mean a lot to me and I consider them the foundational principles on which I built my life. 

Once I put those principles in place it gave me the ability to choose how I want to structure my life around them. 

Given that, I was lucky in many ways, but if you don’t start by setting yourself up in the right way, you can’t get lucky in the right way. Before you know it, you will be saying “I have maximized my money points” but have no meaningful places to spend that money. You might as well be playing World of Warcraft and maximizing those points. 

The real question is, how are you going to improve your life?

Over an extended period of time, the only truly valuable thing you can buy with money is the ability to do other things. In essence, the most important thing you can buy with money is time. So you have to look at how much value you get at buying back an hour of your time? How about 5 hours?

This is one of the reasons why I have enjoyed running my own business. It is a lot of work and even more responsibility. To a lot of people, the responsibility of the failures that fall squarely on you is too much and that is enough for them to turn away from starting their own company. As we discussed previously, I have learned to accept my failures and learn from them, even if I wish I had learned faster and I wish they hadn’t been as painful. 

Circling back to the question, it comes down to how you go about building your life after putting the principles of who you want to be in place. 

Ask yourself, How am I going to be involved as a father or a mother with the lives of my children? For me, the important part is spending time with your kids. People often talk about quality time, but I am of the belief that the amount of time you spend with your kids is the more important part. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that for any talented professional, there is an infinite amount of work to do, meaning that there will always be an infinite amount of work left tomorrow. With this in mind, you learn to assess your performance based on whether or not you have done a good job for your company and making sure that you have completed some of the tangible points within that infinite amount of work. 

Some days, you will feel as though nothing gets done. You woke up, answered emails, had meetings, and the day was suddenly over. A lot of activity, but no action. Other days, you work hard on one thing that you will be able to use over and over again. And others still, you accomplish in the first few hours you are working then the rest of the week combined. It is a give and take; a balancing act. I have mentioned before that I don’t like the phrase “Work Life Balance” for me it is an integrated thing; I get a lot of joy out of work. 

Right now, she thinks that you are the greatest thing since sliced bread, but just wait until she becomes a teenager, then she will be asking you to go back to work. To bring this back into the lens of work, I found that I was a better manager after having children. Looking at the way that you have to influence kids to do things. Kids can’t hide things, they aren’t sophisticated enough, so when you are dealing with them it is very apparent how they feel about what you are telling them to do. Because of this, you have to be very subtle in the way that you influence them to get the outcome that you want. This gave me insight into how to more effectively get the desired outcomes from my team. 

I am not saying that all parents are better managers or that you need to have kids in order to be good at your job, but it helps give you perspective on the types of communication that will be effective. 

Finally, as a boss or founder, it is important to be mindful of how late you are sending emails and how those emails are perceived by the people who are working for you. 

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