It turns out, when you have a whole other human being doing full time unpaid labor that is completely essential to your well being, you can succeed professionally.
I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.
This is an example of partnership, division of labour, and increasing returns to expertise. This is a normal upper middle class marriage insofar as one partner has a successful career and the other provides support to that career. There are other ways of doing an upper middle class marriage. The ones that involve two high powered careers necessitate full time support staff, whether paid, two nannies, or extremely supportive family, usually grandparents.
Very few people get to their thirties without realising that a marriage is a partnership and that having a family is a demanding project which requires a lot of work.
My point was all the comments adulating the one man when there is literally another person putting all of her effort into making their lives possible. The author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner. But this woman is all but invisible outside of this comment thread.
Society used to be legally structured around a system where people were paired on a gender system optimized for a nuclear family, where both individuals contribute their labor to their common good while one receives all of the autonomy, financial control, status, praise, and respect; the one who received all of this was always male.
The only thing that has changed is that women are legally allowed to be the breadwinner. Enormous social and economic structures still pressure them into being the less valued member of the family unit. Domestic labor is still heavily undervalued, disrespected, and seen as a woman's sphere. The number of full time fathers is still extremely low, and people still judge family units with a full time father as less prosperous than one with a full time mother.
When we descend by class and race down the social hierarchy, the picture becomes extremely complicated, of course.
But I was just talking about Internet comments, you know?
> The author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner.
Though it appears he did so after being prompted by a (female!) questioner asking what his wife's up to; he wrote the original Quora answer without mentioning anything about how her career was altered.
Slavery is also a great example of partnership (a stable relationship backed by shackles and violence), division of labor (I sit around; you work!) and increasing returns to expertise (I can do more due to having better living conditions and more friends and connections than you, slave). I don't get your point here.
> I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail.
I see no comments below where that crucial detail was relevant to mention, only a number of a comments that express that they found the post interesting and enlightening?
That is claptrap. If it were a family story you'd have a family blog, and a separate family member would write about how they all pitched in to help you get tenure.
All of us know that the main takeawy of the story is about you. Your desperate disclaimers don't do anything.
I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.