How to Blog And Work From Home and Not Go Insane
by Mike-the-Pharmacist
Someone asked on a business group a question that made me chuckle out loud. COL. It’s like LOL but more of a chuckle or chortle.
How do you balance being an entrepreneur and a parent?
That is supposed to be one of the goals of this blog. I am the expert. 5 businesses and 50 business ideas. Author of the future NY Times BestSeller “How I went from a pharmacist making good money, to seeing the job market dry up quicker than the Sahara dessert during a summer heat wave, to learning how to be a full-time All-Star blogger sharing the wonderful adventures of being at
I may opt for a shorter title. While Chicago is the windy city, I could be the long-winded blogger. I asked someone if I should shorten my blog posts and extend them into a weekly series.
They said, you probably should break it down into a monthly series. Ouch. My blogs can read like a Lord-of-the-Rings Trilogy. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, and maybe I just need to add some orcs, hobbits, and have 2nd breakfast. And I could do a 2nd blog with it.
Anyway, now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.
Am I allowed to be the expert if being at home, trying to get something going, seems insane?
Is it normal to have a melt down trying to get kids in bed and asleep and feel like you are going ballistic to get down and blog about how you love being an at-home-blogging parent? Asking for a friend.
A short while back a guy contacted me on LinkedIn. He was part of a business group and passive income project that used Amway for it’s products, and had a 3 year plan to produce serious income. It is not a bad system, you just had to be willing to buy $500 worth of overpriced stuff every month and convince 5 others to do the same, and they had to each convince 5 and so on. The challenge I have with those is it’s hard enough to get 5 people to do something with your for FREE. And then if you do find that person who can find the 5 who can then find 5 more, well, he soon becomes a Superstar and just like an NBA free agent, next thing you know your best producer just packed up and left for a sweeter deal.
The thing that made me laugh was the appeal – they focus more on the dream of being at home and being able to throw out your
Reality is I have been there. That is not what happens.
You have kids who refuse to go out and play, refuse to give up the phone, refuse to share the ball, and finally get out just as rain starts to fall. Then your now-muddy-dogs eat all the butterflies, the kids finally stop calling each other names but then they end up colliding with each other minutes after they started playing nicely in the mud, and you are inside ready with ice packs and towels and looking for a movie to put on knowing that at best just 3 out of 5 kids will watch what you put on.
So you have to be creative and think which 2 kids that get left out won’t kill the other 3 when you make the selection.
If you luck out and put on the right movie, you can go down and blog. About being a great attentive parent working from home so you can spend time with your kids.
Usually if you have any affiliate links on your post you need to have a disclaimer. My disclaimer here is the movie Captain Phillips did not send me any money for this post. And no Somalia pirates or aliens were injured during this blog posting.
Thankfully, my one son rented Independence Day: Resurgence and without Will Smith, I didn’t have any desire to see that one. So I was free to sneak down to my office while the Will Smith-less pilots battled new aliens.
And it’s kind of odd, because the new live action Disney movie Aladdin has Will Smith in it and I won’t see it because the genie is not Robin Williams. Later they had on Captain Phillips, the deep sea adventure where the cargo ship captain played by Tom Hanks is kidnapped by Somalia pirates and that is one of those I have to
Most of my movie watching is seeing 3 or 4 ten minute scenes and over the course of a few years, I have seen all these movies in full, just not exactly sure if the order is down correctly.
I haven’t even seen a full movie in the theaters because either I have fallen asleep at some point or one or two needed a bathroom break or two and so I always miss the critical crucial scenes – like when Snope or Snape or Snoope or Snoopy or whatever that guy’s name is in the Last Jedi when he gets sliced in half and there are all these red velvet guards being killed. I had to take my daughter to the bathroom and come back to see him sliced in two and didn’t know what happened. Until I caught that 10 minute scene on demand later.
Back to Captain Phillips, I do think they should have taken a little bit more creative license in the movie by giving Tom Hanks an imaginary friend to keep him company in the escape pod he was being held hostage in. Perhaps a volley ball he could have painted a face on, and he could have named it Wilson Phillips. And that 80’s reference probably went way over most people’s heads.
I want to encourage you blogging-Captain-Phillips-fans. “Don’t worry Irish, ebery-ting going to be ok.”
I am not being unthankful for my family. I do love my wife for sure. I love my kids yes, but the issue is this – mental illness is hereditary. It comes from your children. This guy selling me the Amway dream tried painting a picture of how wonderful it would be to never have to go to work. Um, when I am unemployed, I go batty. And I get nothing done.
I get more done around the house and in my side hustles and my blogging when I am working a job 30-50 hours that week then when I had the whole week off. Maybe it’s because my brain thinks I am on vacation mode, I don’t know. But the idea that I would have this all powerful WHY -(which will be used as motivation to convince people to buy overpriced dry-as-Sahara peanut-butter Protein Bars and $60 containers of chocolate protein shakes that you can find for $20 at Wal Mart and $40 mini concentrated containers of laundry soap -) to stay home instead of working a job is not all that appealing to the male make up. That could be why so many guys die the week after they retire. Just to be safe, I am scheduled to work until 4:30 the day of my funeral.
Having been unemployed for great lengths of time, and someone trying to sell me on the fact you can live indefinitely from working from home seems to send me into panic mode. I am not a good Mr. Mom. I do not have those amazing multi-taskable talents my wife has, of being able to watch 5 kids and dogs and make dinner and vacuum stairs, hardwood floors and fish tanks, touch up paint the basement, water the garden, get the kids dressed, and accomplish everything else she does in the few hours I spend trying to get a blog going and do a Facebook live.
My response to that persons question was this – “That’s funny. I have 5 kids, a lap top, a desk top, and a cell phone. 90% of my time spent working at home is fighting for my equipment as me and 2 of the 5 kids are usually are on the outside looking in when it comes to this game today of musical devices. I get started on a project and 5 minutes later there is a fire (real or figuratively) to put out or one kid is choking the other. If I do get uninterrupted time in my basement office, soon after is usually an expensive repair. Just a few weeks ago, I was excited to have completed a full blog post, but the reason I was able to was during that time (I found out later, of course) the younger siblings were filling and bringing down buckets of water from the upstairs bathroom to fill up the kiddie pool outside and in the process they flooded the ceiling — so if I can work, it means they are up to trouble. If I can’t work, as least I know the house isn’t being burned down .
I can wait for bedtime but it’s 11:45 pm right now and the only one ready for bed is me.
So if I could outlast the kids and maybe work from midnight to 3 am when the house is quiet, and somehow get up before the kids do when they break into my office and decode my password and get on my computers, and spill sodas on my desk and leave chips in my office and melted fruit roll ups in my desk chairs, meaning I get up at say 6 and work til 8, I could likely pull it off. Or I could maybe get placed in a padded room with my laptop and get some work done as well.”
I heard of a father who’s wife called him to check on things. “How are things going, hun? ” He goes, “the 4 of us are enjoying our Saturday thanks!” and the wife in a panic says, “Honey, we have 5 kids, and it’s Friday. You were supposed to take them to school.”
I literally have to constantly remind myself how many kids I have at the moment. We have 5. My wife’s sisters have 4, 6, and 7 I believe. Or two have 6 kids. At times our house has anywhere from no kids to 30 kids under age 13. At times I am the only one in the house with 10 kids such as when one of her sisters has another kid. But the strange thing is when you have 1 or 2 it can be harder then when you have 10. This is why so many kids have their own cell phone today. Back in the day you could send them to a farm to work all day. Now you can’t with labor laws but you can give a 2 year old your phone. Crazy.
On a serious note, we are trying to balance this. It does feel a lot of times like a hostage negotiation. “If I take care of kids for 96 hours can I get 15 minutes to blog?” I am having a hard time convincing my wife that the people who make $100,000 a month blogging are not just doing it 15 minutes twice a week. This may be an argument I don’t win until I bring home a $100,000 paycheck, which at this rate will take me to the year 2056. Wish me luck.
Another opportunity to use a Captain Phillips reference. My old boss is now one of those
One idea my wife had is to send me to the library once a week and I can work on the computers there. Which means there will be one more computer back here for the kids to use so maybe WWIII won’t break out back home while I am away. Which may mean I can work in peace, and for longer than 5 minutes. Reality is I will drive away, get on the library computer, start typing, and get a call that a sister is in labor.
Is there truly the real dream of being a successful entrepreneur? Or are we just not content? Meaning, those working full time jobs day dream about being financially free to travel the world and fire their boss. And those who lost their full time jobs, really would just want a good full time job.
The one thing that keeps me sane is knowing how many people live in regret thinking, if I could only go back and warn my old self to prepare him to make different choices.
My consolation is that I wouldn’t have listened to the warning anyway. I could tell my old self anything and he would be like, “that’s you buddy. Good luck. But things will be different once I am in your shoes.”
So dream the dream.
But just because everyone else wants to work at home, there is no shame in working out a special solution for your circumstances like having to work at the library.
And know there maybe isn’t going to be a way in reality to balance at present being the Super Dad being home and excited to be home.
And excited kids that are just as excited dad is home, as they are for the fact his phone is.
Or you can wait until the kids are out of the house to be able to have the perfect at home business – but if you do that, you likely will have lost your home by then anyhow.
Work is hard no matter where you do it. Or where you do it.
Expect thorns and thistles and to feel like it’s an uphill battle.
And maybe get a side hustle AND A JOB outside the home to get you more time to let your dream take off.
There’s no shame in doing both of those. You just might find, though, there’s not as much humor in it.