I want to share some of the reasons being a parent has been (somewhat unexpectedly) so good for me personally. I think these reasons will apply to almost every parent.

Before I start, I want to make it clear my goal is not to convince everyone to have kids, but rather to show that parenthood is awesome in a couple of ways that I don’t think get talked about enough.

Being your child’s parent has limited (or no) competition

Competition to be your child’s best parent is extremely limited. Unlike your professional interests (and likely your hobbies), the odds are pretty good that the pool of people trying to parent your child specifically is small. Sometimes, it might be a pool of one. I certainly feel that I’m only competing against myself—that my wife and I occupy different, non-competitive niches in our daughter’s life. Within my niche, I am number one; undefeated! It doesn’t matter to me that there isn’t really anyone I’m competing against—it still gives me satisfaction to know that I am the best at what I do.

Furthermore, whatever you do for your child is going to be a large fraction of their life experience. It doesn’t matter very much if the things you do for them are imperfect—what matters more is that you try. Just trying can get you to the top of the leaderboard—but you have to try.

Being a parent is orthogonal to other interests

How good of a parent you are can be completely uncorrelated with your professional success, your financial situation, or your hobbies. This decorrelation between parenting and the rest of your life makes it easier to still feel like a success, even if the only thing you’re succeeding in is being a good parent to your child.

Being a parent is a great mix of instant and delayed gratification

There are two kinds of work—work that has instantaneous rewards, and work that has delayed rewards. In my experience, optimal productivity and happiness in one’s work requires a mix of both kinds of work.

Working without any short-term feedback on how you’re doing makes it difficult to improve. Also, a lack of short-term rewards in your work will make each day exhausting, because at the end of each day you can be left thinking “What did I do all that work today for?”

On the other hand, work that only has short-term rewards will never build up to a lifetime of achievement that you can look back on with satisfaction. You might be happy on each individual day, but the overall narrative arc is missing.

Parenting, in my opinion, has the perfect mix of short-term and long-term rewards. In the short-term, it is generally rewarding to spend any amount of time with your kids doing something they enjoy. In the long-term, the things you work to teach them (both knowledge and values) can gradually shape your child into a fully-fledged human that you are happy to associate with.