A parent's job is reducing tomorrow’s regrets
Read time: 2½ minutes
Welcome to issue #026 of Unicorn Parents. Each week, I share practical insights and reflections to help you build a profitable business without missing the magic at home. If you’re serious about winning at work while raising great kids, you’ve come to the right place. This is a community built for ambitious parents who want both.
Most parents try to be perfect.
We try to get everything right, cover every base, anticipate every need.
But the longer I’m a parent, the more I realize that perfection doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think.
What actually matters is regret.
The kind that shows up years later, quietly, after the noise settles.
Most parents seem to have the same three regrets:
I wish I slowed down.
I wish I understood my kid better.
I wish I didn’t outsource so much of their childhood to screens, tutors, or busyness.
What’s sad is that we rarely feel these regrets in real time.
In the moment, everything feels normal. Necessary. Justified.
It’s only later (sometimes much later!) that we see the cost.
But regret isn’t random.
It’s surprisingly predictable.
And anything predictable can be managed.
Parenting while juggling business becomes a lot simpler when you stop aiming for perfection and start focusing on reducing the regrets you’ll carry ten years from now.
And the best place to start is with small moments.
Small moments don’t look impressive on a calendar.
They don’t feel “productive,” and they don’t show up as milestones.
But they land deeply.
A walk after dinner.
A joke that becomes a family inside joke.
A bedtime routine they refuse to let you skip.
Those tiny repetitions, done daily or weekly, shape a child far more than the big, dramatic gestures we overthink.
They become memory anchors.
I think about this often because of Dr. Grace Shin, someone I deeply admire.
Multiple degrees, brilliant mind, respected leader.
Her husband is the same.
And their son, Peter, is one of the most remarkable young men I know.
I met him when he was in high school—athletic, smart, grounded.
The kind of kid who has real friends, real character, real direction.
Now he’s newly married and finishing his first year of medical school.
And you’d think, with a family like that, the “secret” was
…some elite tutoring system or
…a perfectly engineered schedule or
…some master plan.
But no.
The real secret was a small moment. Repeated thousands of times.
Every morning, for twelve years, from first grade until the day he graduated high school, Dr. Shin drove Peter to school.
And before he ran off to class, she prayed with him.
Every day.
Same routine, same ritual, same moment.
Twelve years of presence.
Twelve years of consistency.
Twelve years of speaking into his life when he wasn’t keeping track, but his heart was.
There was nothing flashy about it.
Nothing “optimized.”
Nothing that would appear on a college application.
Just one faithful moment, done again and again, shaping a boy into a man.
Kids don’t need us to perform perfectly.
They need us to show up regularly.
Presence communicates something subtle but powerful:
“I’m here, even when life is full.”
And that message does more for a child’s resilience than any perfectly executed routine ever could.
We are Unicorn Parents.
We are juggling ambition, vocation, and family at the same time.
And if we’re being honest, we know we’re not going to get it all right.
AND we don’t need to.
Reducing one regret at a time is enough.
The deals, the milestones, the goals.
They’ll come and go.
However, the moments you invest in your kids?
They will outlast all of it.
So go a little deeper this week.
Not perfect.
Just present.
Reduce one regret.
That’s enough.