You Were a Top Performer Before You Had Kids—Now What?

You were the go-to before the kids. Now you're anxious, stretched, and questioning your worth. What if you haven't lost your edge—just outgrown the game?

You might be thinking: “I used to be top performer.”

It sounds like a confession. A quiet admission that something was lost.

But maybe it’s not.

Let’s look at it clearly: what do we actually mean by “top performer”? And why does it feel like we’ve fallen when we stop being one?

The Reality Shift No One Warns Us About

We’re in our late twenties. No kids. Maybe no partner. Our schedule is our own. We can optimize our sleep, our workouts, our coding sprints, our calendar. We chase every challenge. We win most of them. We’re praised. Promoted. Our name comes up in skip-level meetings.

Then life expands. We get married. We have a child. Then maybe another. Sleep becomes fragmented. Our evenings are no longer our own. Our priorities start competing with each other—brutally and without mercy. We’re still smart, still driven, but we’re no longer optimized for output.

We’re no longer the top performers.

But here’s the catch: we didn’t become less. We became more.

Still, that transition doesn’t come clean. It comes with friction.

We start to second-guess ourselves. Feel guilty for saying no. Worry we’re slipping.

There's an identity crisis embedded in the shift—from being the always-on, always-there high performer to someone who's choosing their battles. It's disorienting. We miss the clarity of old goals, the feedback loops, the wins we could count.

Letting go of that old version of ourselves isn't just about time management—it’s about letting go of who we thought we had to be to stay valuable.

The Presence Shift: Why Family Comes First

Before we even talk about work, let’s talk about something more fundamental: family.

As our lives expand, our families—especially our kids—don’t just want our career success. They want our presence. And we start to realize that being there, really being there, is not just a nice-to-have. It’s essential.

Healthy families don’t run on autopilot. They grow through time, attention, and presence—just like anything else worth building. And if we’re honest, some of our most important leadership lessons don’t come from the office. They come from parenting through a meltdown or sitting through a tough family conversation without checking Slack.

This shift—toward presence—isn’t a detour. It’s part of the path.

And it doesn’t stay contained at home. It changes how we think about our careers, our time, and what performance really means. The same energy we once poured into launches and sprint planning now stretches across school pickups, family dinners, and maintaining emotional connection. The scoreboard shifts—even if no one at work updates the metrics.

And there’s a broader consequence here.

If we want to create compassionate, healthy, and successful communities, the energy we invest in our families is foundational. These early bonds—formed through presence, patience, and care—become the emotional and psychological scaffolding for how the next generation will show up in the world. We don’t just raise kids. We raise future neighbors, coworkers, citizens, and friends. A stable society begins with stable homes.

For some, that stable anchor might be family. For others, it could be health, community, or a creative pursuit. The shape doesn’t matter. The depth does.

Two Engineers, Two Games

Take Alex and Jamal.

Both were stars a few years back—pulling late nights, leading critical launches, always one step ahead of the sprint board. Recognition followed. So did promotions.

Fast forward. Jamal has two kids under five. His mornings start with daycare drop-offs and spilled cereal. Evenings are split between bedtime stories and troubleshooting production issues. He's no longer visible in every meeting, not on every email thread. But he’s sharp on the essentials. He picks his battles. He’s the calm in chaos.

He listens more than he speaks, asks sharp questions, and rarely rushes to answer. His decisions carry weight not because they’re loud, but because they’re thought through.

Junior engineers seek him out—not because he’s the loudest, but because his judgment is trusted, earned through presence, consistency, and a reputation for clarity in complexity.

Even when he hasn't had time to review every detail, he brings a kind of directional clarity that others can build on. His strength isn’t in controlling every variable—it’s in creating calm and coherence when others feel scattered.

Alex, on the other hand, is still chasing the old rhythm. He’s in every meeting, replies to every ping, and pushes himself to remain visible across every corner of the organization. He’s trying to outpace the inevitable entropy that comes with scaling roles and growing life demands. But it’s starting to crack. He feels the fatigue in small moments: snapping at a teammate, struggling to focus, losing the thread in conversations that used to excite him. Burnout creeps in. Frustration too. He sees others finding a different rhythm—more focused, more deliberate—but fears that slowing down will look like falling behind. The system hasn’t rewarded restraint, so Alex hasn’t changed tactics. He’s still playing the old game, even as the rules around him have shifted.

And there’s a quiet weight that builds when we keep chasing what once worked but no longer fits. Nostalgia can be comforting, but it’s also deceptive. It blinds us to what this season of life actually calls for. Growth doesn’t always look like acceleration—it often looks like subtraction.

The difference isn’t in intelligence or ambition. It’s in adaptation.

When Engineers Become Managers

For engineering managers, the shift hits twice.

First, we transition from being deeply technical contributors—writing code, fixing bugs, leading architecture—to orchestrating the work of others. Then, just when we start to find our rhythm in that leadership space, life throws us another layer: we grow families, age into new responsibilities, and find that even leadership itself needs to evolve.

One of the hardest things to let go of is the idea that we need to be on top of everything. We remember what it felt like to know every commit, every decision, every plan. But that era doesn’t scale—not with growing teams, and certainly not with growing families.

So we adapt. We start focusing not on knowing every detail, but on creating clarity for others, even when we’re not the one holding all the context. We learn to trust more, delegate better, and stay grounded in the face of ambiguity.

And here’s where many well-intentioned managers miss the mark: we plan team outings, virtual coffees, and hackathons—thinking these will build culture. But those activities rarely land if the underlying environment isn’t safe. Psychological safety isn’t built on pizza parties. It’s built on how we respond when someone shares a concern, admits a mistake, or pushes back on an idea. Without that safety, social gestures feel performative. With it, even simple rituals—like weekly check-ins—become meaningful. The tone we set, quietly and consistently, determines whether our team connects or retreats.

Culture doesn’t start with social calendars. It starts with emotional posture. If people feel they can speak the truth without fear—about timelines, blockers, or even personal challenges—then they’ll engage. Otherwise, they’ll perform.

This is what it means to lead people, not just projects.

It’s about mentorship. Shielding the team. Creating clarity in ambiguity. And being the person others feel safe around—not just the one who unblocks them technically, but the one who models how to move through complexity without panic.

And here’s the surprising part: the deeper we go into this human-centered leadership, the more influence we have—not less. But it’s quiet influence. The kind that doesn’t trend on dashboards but echoes in team morale, trust, and long-term stability.

From Output to Judgment

In our twenties, our value came from how much we could do. Volume was king—lines of code, projects shipped, late nights logged. It was a sprint, and we ran it well.

But in our late thirties or forties, our value comes from how well we decide what not to do. What we say no to becomes just as important as what we take on. Focus becomes a strategy, not a constraint.

Our edge is no longer raw energy. It’s discernment. Tradeoffs. Emotional regulation. Navigating ambiguity when everything feels important and nothing can be dropped. It's reading the room, calming the chaos, choosing what actually matters.

Performance, in the traditional sense, is a single-player game. Life isn’t. There’s no solo leaderboard for raising children, supporting a partner, or helping a team thrive.

So why are we still using the same scoreboard?

First Principles: What Are We Actually Optimizing For?

Most workplace performance metrics are built for a narrow phase of life. They assume:

• Infinite focus hours

• Rapid output

• Low emotional labor

• Few competing priorities outside of work

Once we grow a family, those assumptions break. But the system doesn’t.

So if we keep playing by the old rules, we’ll either burn out or quietly punish ourselves for not being who we once were.

But if we re-anchor our internal metrics to our current life system, a new clarity emerges. We stop asking, “Why am I not producing like I used to?”
And start asking: “What deserves my best attention now?”

A Mental Model: The Barbell of Life

From finance, the barbell strategy suggests putting our assets in two extremes: very safe and very risky—while deliberately avoiding the middle.

Why avoid the middle? Because it often carries the illusion of balance without delivering meaningful reward or protection. In finance, mid-risk investments can expose us to loss without the benefit of high upside. They're neither secure enough to be safe, nor bold enough to be transformative.

The same logic applies to how we spend our time and energy.

Trying to maintain moderate effort across everything—being half-in on family, half-in on work, half-in on ten different projects—leaves us exhausted but ineffective. We dilute our presence without producing depth in any area.

In life, the barbell looks like this:

• Stable responsibilities: family, health, emotional stability.

• Targeted risk: the one project, idea, or decision that matters most right now.

We don’t spread ourselves thin across dozens of things. We don’t try to be excellent at everything. We protect what must be protected, and we channel our ambition where it truly matters. Ambition doesn’t go away—it matures. It stops chasing visibility and starts pursuing meaning. It trades breadth for depth. We choose. Ruthlessly.

And that choice, done well, is a new form of excellence.

An Example of the Barbell in Real Life

Imagine someone trying to maintain peak performance in all areas: they’re juggling a high-visibility project at work, volunteering for a local nonprofit, training for a marathon, keeping up with every Slack thread, and trying to be fully present with their kids.

They’re operating in the middle of everything—with moderate effort, but no true depth. They're tired, constantly switching contexts, and feeling behind in every direction.

Now contrast that with someone who’s clear: they protect their evenings for family. They go deep on one major initiative at work. They say no to most things that don’t align. Their calendar looks emptier, but their mind is clearer. Their impact is quieter, but more focused.

That’s the barbell at work—one side held down by foundational commitments, the other lifted by a single, well-placed bet.

This isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing what matters, without apology.

The Hidden Priority: The Compounding Power of Presence

We often talk about compounding in terms of wealth, skills, or career growth. But there’s another kind of compounding most people overlook: presence.

Small, consistent moments of attention—reading to our kids, asking how their day went, sitting through their silence or their storms—these moments build something that can’t be measured in quarterly reviews. They build trust. Security. A sense of belonging that pays dividends far into the future.

And here’s the thing: just like in finance, compounding works best when we start early and stay steady. We don’t get to rerun these early years. Once a moment passes, it doesn’t return with interest.

If we’re serious about building sustainable lives—not just careers—we need to see time with family not as a cost, but as an investment. It’s not about balance. It’s about priority. We give our best not just to the job, but to the people we love most—and that, too, is performance.

So What Now?

We don’t need to reclaim our old peak. We need to redefine it.

Top performers optimize for visible output.
Evolved performers optimize for sustainable impact.

Sometimes that impact looks like high-leverage decisions at work.
Sometimes it looks like being the calm in our child’s emotional storm.

Both matter.
And neither fits neatly into a performance review.

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So the real question is this:
If we’re no longer top performers in the old game, what game are we actually playing now?

And what would winning look like?