All right, let's do one more question. We got one more question here. This one comes from Dave. Dave says, my wife and I have a 13-month-old child and would like to have another. We're both working professionals who have built substantial career capital. So they're both mid-career professionals. I find myself increasingly drawn to being a stay-at-home dad for the next five years or so while my children are young.

While acknowledging that this would cause a drastic change in my career trajectory, do you have any advice on how I can continue to stay engaged and build or maintain career capital while taking such a long time away from work? All right, that's an interesting question. I wouldn't really sweat career capital maintenance, at least at first, if you're going to shift to be a stay-at-home parent.

That's where your focus is. I would say in today's professional landscape, this is much more understood than it used to be. So if you say, I did this, this, this. I was at this point in my career. I have a lot of career capital. Three years, I disappeared. And then I came back onto the scene.

To say, yeah, I disappeared for those three years because I was taking care of my kids, this is way more understood. You don't really need a more elaborate explanation than that. Now, if you're talking about a five-year period-- and by the way, I'm pulling these timelines out of thin air, so don't take this too seriously.

But roughly speaking, I think if you're talking about maybe a five-year period, maybe around year three is when you bring back in-- or year four, maybe you bring back in the part-time consulting, whatever it is, the limited engagements, just to get your foot back in the door, to pick up on the newer skills, to get your name back out there, more importantly, to help you start sniffing out the different opportunities so you're not just trying to go for-- if you go from zero to 60, now I need a full-time job, you might end up landing in a job that's not the right setup for what you're looking for.

So it allows you to get your foot back in the door, see what's going on, test the water if you do want to go back to work. And if you do, where do you want to fall on the spectrum of doing your own thing as a consultant or going back and working for a firm?

You get a lot of good insight. But I think for the first three years, if you can be at home, be at home. And your focus should be on that. Also, remember the whole point of career capital, the theory laid out in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You," is that the whole point of career capital is that it gives you something you can invest to get in return traits in your career that resonate.

So you have this general vision of a lifestyle that is very appealing. Oftentimes, the things that makes lifestyles appealing are themselves valuable. So you have to have something valuable to offer in return. So you build up rare and valuable skills. This gives you more career capital. You invest that capital to get more control and autonomy over your career.

But the whole reason you do that is so that you can shape your career towards a lifestyle that resonates. Well, if what's resonating with you right now is a lifestyle where you're home with your kids, you've jumped to where we're trying to get. The career capital is a means to the end of, I have autonomously shaped a lifestyle that resonates with me.

It's one of the things you can use to get there. But if this lifestyle resonates, I want to be there in my kids' life during this young period of their age and be more engaged in family life and what have you, then you are already at the end. So you don't have to worry so much about career capital.

And then when it comes time to come back to work, if you want to go back to work, you should be doing this from a lifestyle perspective. Oh, is there a lifestyle I have in mind here that work now plays a role again? But I want to be surprised in your situation where you're saying, I really like this lifestyle where I'm with my kids.

And maybe now they're getting a little bit older. They're in school most of the day. And so I don't want to just be at home. But I want to maintain a lot of the aspects I like of this lifestyle. I like to be there in the mornings. I like the fact that I can pick them up after school when they're done.

And I think this is really important. But I also want something else to do. This may lead you to a very different type of career trajectory than if you were just trying to stay on the trajectory you're on now. Maybe this is a trajectory you're saying, I'm not trying to be the partner at my engineering firm.

I want 10 hours a week of consulting work that is interesting to me. And because I was pretty good before I put what I was doing on pause, I get a pretty good hourly rate for it. And that's nice. And it helps me to make things a little bit more flexible in the household.

But it also gives me a lot of flexibility. I mean, your whole vision might be different. So what I'm trying to say here is the goal for all of this type of thinking is autonomously crafting a lifestyle that resonates, that you had an idea and you made that actually happen.

That's the whole ballgame here. So in the professional world, if there's a particular trait you want in your job, I want very flexible hours or a lot of money or this or that, then career capital is really important to it. But you're playing a bigger level here where job fits in there here.

But there's other things also going on. So work backwards from the lifestyle that resonates. I'm reading your long elaboration here. You're very good at what you do. There will be economic opportunities for you. If you want to get back to it after three years, start doing something so that you can get a sense of what do I really want to do.

But don't really sweat career capital in the sense of this in itself is the end. Your goal is not in life to have as much career capital as possible. Your goal in life is to have a life that is shaped as much as possible towards what you really care about.

Capital is one of many tools that you can deploy. So I say go for it, man. Get home, be there with the kids, do cool things with them, get weird hobbies that they get involved with you with, get to know the teachers at the school, whatever it is. Go over the top and decorating for holidays, all the cool stuff you get to do when you actually have some time.

And just enjoy that resonating for a while. And then if you need to bring work back into it, bring work back to it.