Never Would I Ever - My American Life

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/140/family-business

There is never a chance in the world that I would ever work in a business with anyone from my family; this includes my wife.

Let's start with blood relatives - my parents and sisters. Nope, never would I think it a good idea to put my family int eh same room with me and create a business with them. We don't play well with each other. We don't communicate, we don't share, and we all think that we should be the person in charge and that everyone else has horrible ideas. Just look at our family gatherings. They're always a mess. It's always a great idea to bring all of us together, but in practice, it's a mess of families that have little in common with each other, people that don't talk to each other except for occasional phone calls to each other about birthdays, and generations of people that don't know or deal with each other.

Doing something as easy as playing a board game can't end with good vibes between each other, so there's never a chance in the world that we'd be able to do a for profit business together with each other. The business would go under.

As for my wife, I love her to death, but we wouldn't be able to agree on much with the business setting, and neither of us would be able to leave work at work. No matter which of us was the person in charge, the other person wouldn't be happy with it. No matter how great the choices one of us would make the other one would doubt or second guess them, and we'd totally bring it home with us and talk to them about their choices.

We love each other. We can deal with each other outside of work quite a bit, but we're also both very opinionated, and have very different approaches towards problems. It's part of life. Just because we're married to each other does not mean that we have to agree on everything all of the time, and that's what I love about it. We don't agree on everything, but the things that are important we totally agree on. Unfortunately, business practices is not one of the things that we agree on.

I love my family, but there's never a chance that I'd willingly go into business with them.