My daughter starts college on Monday.
My goal this week was to get as much time with her as I could before she started classes. She was busy: friends, going-away plans, last errands that had nothing to do with me. I got a car ride here. A family lunch picnic there. Short conversations. Fragments.
The same week, I spent multiples days working on a client’s fundraising projections and a new strategy document for how my company plans to address the opportunity around tokenized money. For the client’s financial projections, we weren’t chasing upside. We were killing it, actually. Every time a number looked good, we stopped and asked what had to be true for it to hold up. We wanted assumptions a skeptical investor or lender couldn’t take apart in the first meeting. Conservative. Defensible. Built to survive contact with reality.
Here’s the tension I realized this morning: I ran that discipline for a stranger’s business all week, and never once ran it on my own life.
The Reality Check: I had assumed I’d have more time with my daughter than I actually had.
Not because I’m careless. Because time with your kid feels like an asset with unlimited runway, right up until the week it isn’t. I never stress-tested that assumption. I never asked “what has to be true for ‘we’ll have time later’ to actually hold?” I just believed it, the same way a founder believes his best-case revenue line, because believing it is easier than sitting with the alternative.
In a data room, the whole job is finding the assumption that’s really just a hope wearing a spreadsheet’s clothes. You go line by line. Growth rate: defensible, or wishful? Payback period: real, or rounded up to make the story prettier? You protect the founder from his own optimism, because an investor will find the soft spot in thirty seconds if you don’t find it first.
I never ran that exercise on “I’ll have plenty of time with my daughter before she leaves.” I let it sit in the model, unstressed, undefended. This week, it came due, and the number I got back wasn’t the one I’d modeled. The saying I had heard, and repeated to other parents countless times is coming true. By the time they are 18 years-old you’ve spent 90% of your time with them. There are no refunds and it hurts.
This isn’t really about my daughter, or it’s not only about her. It’s about which parts of a life get the discipline and which parts get to ride on hope, because hope is more comfortable than the audit.
I already know how to do this part. I do it at work without flinching. I ask “is this number defensible, or is it just what I want to be true” because showing an investor a number you can’t back up is the kind of embarrassing you feel in your chest. Take that same discomfort somewhere it actually costs you something. The assumption that you’ll have more time with the people you love, later. Stress-test it now, while there’s still room to act on what you find.
I got a car ride and car picnic this week. Not the number I modeled. The real one.
Next time, I’m not waiting for the fundraising instinct to remind me what a bad assumption looks like. I’m running the audit on my own life first.