Whenever I’m thinking about taking a new job, I always fall back on the same mental calculation: the net present value of future memories.
I came up with this framing years ago when I was comparing two different jobs with very different profiles and opportunity costs. One was a chance to go be a founding sales engineer at a hot tech startup. I would have flown around the country pitching a new product and then would have recruited a team under me to build the business as it grew. The other choice was to stay at Oracle where I was at the time with little chance at growth but also a remote-first role with little travel involved. A few years later I had an opportunity to leave Oracle and go to Accenture doing the typical Monday to Thursday grind for significantly more money than I was being paid at the time. In both cases I used the same model to evaluate my choice.
The model is really simple: given the difference in money and time, which will help me produce the memories I want to have when I look back at this period of my life when I’m 60 years old? When my kids are grown and living their own lives, how much of the money I have then would I pay to have the other memories?
It can be a tricky set of calculations for people. For some people, you really want to earn the money to take your kids on adventures you otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford or you feel the need to provide a certain lifestyle. For others, moving up in status is a critical part of who you see yourself being. And in other cases, the money is vastly different. That’s why it’s a very personal calculation.
The goal isn’t to say “don’t take a more demanding job” or to say you shouldn’t travel for work or make any other decision. All of those are perfectly valid. People work hard jobs for long hours and all ranges of pay. The entire question is very simple. In 30 years will you think this was the right choice? Will you look back and be happy with the relationship you have with your kids? Will you be proud of the model you showed your family? Will you be proud of the risks you did or didn’t take?
In finance, there is a concept called net present value (NPV) that is used to decide whether an investment is worth making. You estimate how much money the investment will bring in each year into the future. Then you discount each of those future amounts back to what it’s worth today, because money later is worth less than money now and because there’s a chance it never shows up. The discount rate captures both: what you could earn on something safer, like treasury bonds, plus extra for the risk. Add up those discounted amounts, subtract what the investment costs you today, and that’s the net present value. If it’s positive, the investment is worth more than it costs.
In this type of exercise, the goal is the same. You imagine what the next 3-5 years of your life will be like if you take the other role, what it will allow you to do or not do, and then you compare it to what you imagine the next 3-5 years are like in the current role. What’s the risk of each going badly or each completely changing your career? How much time will you get to spend with your kids and what are they going to do over those ages? How will your stress levels, presence, and focus change between roles and how will that affect your relationship with your family? Think through each of those and decide if it’s a good use of your time and focus. You only get one chance to create these types of memories.
In some sense this is also an exercise in balancing type 1 and type 2 fun as you figure out how to balance once in a lifetime opportunities for both yourself and your family over time. I’m not sure I’ve ever quite figured it out, but this is at least one framework that has helped me evaluate decisions and be happy with them later.