I have 8 Christmases left with my oldest daughter

And the math is changing how I design my business.

I was on my morning walk in Doha last week. The school run was done. The high that day would be 96 degrees, but at seven in the morning, the air still felt comfortable. I was listening to Start with Why by Emma Grede.

She said something that stopped me.

She was talking about her kids. She said something to the effect of: I have this many years left with all of them in the house. That is the number.

I stood still.

My daughter Mia turns ten in October. She will be eighteen in eight years. Eight summers. Eight school years. Eight Christmases.

Eight more times to sit at a table I built, with the people I built it for, before she goes off to her own life. University. A job. A partner. On holidays, she wants to spend them somewhere else. Years where I will see her on weekends and holidays, if I am lucky.

Eight.

That is not a metaphor. That is the number.

I am writing this down because once you see it, you cannot un-see it. And once you cannot un-see it, you have to do something with it.

For years I have heard founders ask themselves a quiet question. Sometimes it surfaces at three in the morning. Sometimes it surfaces in a hotel room on a business trip. Sometimes it surfaces on a Sunday night when everyone else is asleep and the office is quiet and you are scrolling on your phone in the dark.

The question is: Is this it?

You do not say it out loud. You feel guilty even thinking it. From the outside, everything you have built is the answer to the question you used to ask yourself in your twenties. The business is making money. The team is in place. The accountant says you are doing fine.

But the question keeps coming back.

I want to tell you something I have come to believe about that question.

It is not a sign that something is wrong.

It is a sign that you have outgrown the design.

The life you have was built by an earlier version of you. She was solving the problems she had then. She was making the trade-offs that made sense in her twenties or her thirties or her early forties. She was not designing for the woman you are now.

The business you have was built the same way. The clients you said yes to. The team you hired. The work you took on because it was available. None of it was designed for the founder you have become. It was designed by the founder who needed to survive that year.

When this question shows up, it is not asking you to burn it down. It is not asking you to sell the business. It is not asking you to book a flight to Bali.

It is asking you a much harder question:

If I were designing this from where I am now, what would I design?

That is the question. And it is bigger than the smaller questions you have been asking yourself instead.

The geography question. Should we move?

The school question. Should we put the kids in an international school?

The sabbatical question. Should I take six months?

The sale question. Should I sell the business?

None of those are the real question. They are the smaller questions you ask when you cannot yet bring yourself to ask the big one.

I have lived in four cities in three countries over the last nine years. We moved our family to Doha in August 2024. I run a business that requires me to be in three time zones at any given moment. I have two daughters who do not know what it feels like to have a single-country childhood. They speak in accents that are not mine.

I made every one of those decisions on purpose.

But the truest thing I can tell you is this: I did not make them all at once, and I did not make them with the eight-Christmases number in front of me.

If I had, the order would have been different. Some of the moves would have been the same, and some would have been smaller. The business decisions in the last five years would have been sharper.

The number changes what you say yes to.

You stop saying yes to the conference that overlaps with the school play.

You stop saying yes to the client who only books Friday afternoons.

You stop saying yes to the launch that lands on the week your kids are home from school.

You start designing the business around the eight Christmases instead of the other way around.

That is not a retreat. That is a design.

Here is what I want you to take from this.

The is this it question is not a crisis. It is a signal. Specifically, it is the signal that the design you have outgrew the trade-offs you were willing to make to build it.

The work is not running away. It is not selling everything. It is not booking a flight.

The work is sitting with the design question long enough to answer it honestly.

If I were designing this from where I am now, what would I design?

What would I keep? What would I cut? What would I have said no to if I had known how few of the years were left? What would I design now, with the number I am holding?

That question changes the answer to every other question on your list. The geography question. The team question. The school question. The marriage question. The business question. All of them get cleaner once the design question is on the table.

I am not telling you what to design.

I am telling you the question is the work.

Pull out a piece of paper. Or do this in your head while you make coffee tomorrow morning. It does not have to be a ritual. It just has to be honest.

How many summers do you have left with the people you built this for?

How many Christmases?

How many ordinary Tuesdays?

Count it. Subtract the ones that are already gone. Subtract the partial ones. Look at the number.

Then ask yourself: Is the life I am running designed around that number, or designed around something else?

If the answer is uncomfortable, you are in good company. Most of us are running a life designed by an earlier version of ourselves who did not have the number in front of her.

The good news is that you have it now.

The next eight years can be designed on purpose.

I am still figuring out what to do with mine. The math is still settling. But I know this much: I am not spending the next eight Christmases the same way I spent the last ten. The business will get redesigned around what I want from those Christmases, not the other way around.

That is not a retreat from work. Work is still important to me. The business is still important to me. I want to build for the next decade with the same intensity I built for the last one.

But the design will be different.

I am glad my daughters are growing up with a worldview I did not have. They have connections to countries I had not even visited at their age. They will grow up able to call several places home. That was a design choice I made before I had the math in front of me.

The rest of the design is being made now. And it is being made on purpose.