How Many Dinners Do You Have Left?

Read time: 3½ minutes

Welcome to issue #046 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.

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Everyone Eats Three Meals a Day

My mother used to say this all the time:

“Rich or poor, it doesn’t matter.
Everyone eats three meals a day.”

She was a restaurateur.
It was her way of saying: don’t over-romanticize wealth.
At the end of the day, we’re all human. We all sit down to eat.

For a long time, I heard that as a leveling statement.
Now, I hear it as a warning.

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The Most In-Demand Meeting on My Calendar

Every week, when I pencil in my schedule, one request shows up again and again:

Lunch or dinner.

People want meals.
Deals want meals.
Relationships want meals.

And dinner, in particular, is the most contested real estate on my calendar.

I guard it like a warrior guarding a palace.

Because dinner is for my family.

I used to think:

At least have dinner with your family.

Now I know that framing was wrong.

It’s not at least.

It’s the best.

The best gift I can give myself.
The best thing I can do for my kids.
Not because it’s flashy—but because it compounds.

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The Math That Changed Everything for Me

If you live to be exactly 100 years old, you will eat approximately:

36,525 dinners.

It’s a staggering number at first.
Then it becomes sobering.

Life isn’t made of grand moments.
It’s made of small, repetitive, universal ones.

Whether it’s simple porridge or a five-course feast,
you only get about 36,500 chances to sit down for dinner.

Now let’s narrow the lens.

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The Countdown With Our Kids

From the day your child is born until their 18th birthday, you get:

~6,575 dinners together.

That’s it.

• 18 years × 365 days = 6,570

• Add leap days → ~6,575 dinners

Put differently:

• 940 weekends

• Roughly 18% of your lifetime dinners (if you live to 100)

• And according to a well-known (and painful) observation: by age 18, parents have already spent ~90% of the total time they will ever spend with their children.

So while “everyone eats three meals a day,”
those 6,575 dinners are often the most precious meals of your entire life.

A basic human necessity quietly becomes a countdown.

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Why Dinner Is Sacred (Even If We Don’t Say It Out Loud)

Dinner is where:

• stories get told without agenda

• kids reveal things they didn’t plan to say

• values are absorbed without lectures

• presence does the work words can’t

It’s not the food.
It’s the repetition.

Consistency beats intensity.
Compounding beats heroics.

And yet, this is the first thing we trade away when life gets “important.”

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So Yes—Giving Up Dinner for Work Is a Big Deal

For me, giving up dinner for a work meeting is not neutral.

It costs something real.

It should.

And honestly, it should feel that way for all of us.

Not because work is bad.
But because this time is irreplaceable.

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The Question We’re Avoiding

Here’s the harder question:

What if the best outcome isn’t choosing one over the other?

What if the best job in the world is one that allows us to combine them?

A job where:

• business happens around a table

• kids see how relationships are built

• work is humanized, not hidden

• success doesn’t require disappearance

For most of history, this was normal.
Families lived where they worked.
Meals included apprentices, partners, travelers, neighbors.

Somewhere along the way, we split the table in two:

• business over here

• family over there

I’m not sure that split served us.

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A Special Privilege Entrepreneurs Still Have

As entrepreneurs, we still have a rare privilege:

We can design our lives.

We can host.
We can invite.
We can choose proximity over prestige.
We can let our kids see us build—not just hear about it later.

Do we do this anymore?
Not enough.

But if it’s something that’s been lost,
it’s a tradition worth reviving.

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A Quiet Invitation

You don’t need to quit your ambition.
You don’t need to romanticize poverty.
You don’t need to reject success.

You just need to protect the table.

Because everyone eats three meals a day.
But not everyone pays attention to which ones matter most.

And those 6,575 dinners?

They’re not “at least.”

They’re everything.

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