I was standing at my mum’s funeral holding one of my daughters. She was two weeks old, her sister was in my wife’s arms & neither of them had any idea where they were.
And somewhere between the eulogy I read out and the drive home, something clicked. Not a dramatic realisation, more like a quiet rewiring… whatever happens from this point whether that’s the worst day at work, my business collapsing, a deal falling through, any of it, I have these two girls to look after. That’s the job now & everything else is secondary.
It sounds obvious written down. But when you’ve spent a decade making your business the centre of your identity, “everything else is secondary” is the hardest sentence you’ll ever mean.
Here’s what people get wrong about our situation.
When I tell people my twin daughters have Cystic Fibrosis, I can see it land, the slight pause, the head tilt. The careful “how are they doing?” that really means “how bad is it?”
They assume we’re struggling & they assume the girls are very sick. They picture hospital beds and breathing machines and a life defined by illness.
The reality is different, they’re normal kids tbh. They laugh, they scream, they refuse to nap, they grab everything within reach. They’re chaos in the best way.
But there’s a darker cloud over us. CF doesn’t go away, it’s managed, not cured. And the management is relentless.
Every day we give them antibiotics and saline twice a day. We do PEP physio with them, every day. It’s not dramatic, it’s just the routine now. Like brushing teeth, except the stakes are their lungs.
Then there are the hospital visits.
Ninety minutes to get to the hospital. No child parking, just tiny spaces where you can’t open the doors properly, so I drop my wife and the girls at the entrance and drive around looking for a spot. Then we sit in a small, hot room for two hours while roughly eight different people see us. The girls get stripped and weighed. Sometimes we have to feed them mid-appointment. Sometimes one of them needs a nap and the other one’s screaming. It’s controlled chaos with a medical soundtrack.
And then we drive 90 minutes home almost always in pure silence after the overstimulation and I open my laptop.
That’s the reality of operating as a founder-parent with CF in the family. Not tragic, not inspirational. Just relentless.
Here’s what it’s given me though: clarity.
After my mum, after the diagnosis, health is everything. Without health, you have nothing. Not revenue, not exits, not LinkedIn followers. Nothing. That’s not a motivational quote, it’s something I watched play out in real time.
And that clarity bleeds into everything.
I came back to work after Christmas this year and the business was in a tough spot. My co-founder Sam had been holding the fort while I was on paternity leave and had a really hard year. He was feeling quite low & was struggling to see what the future of NOVOS looks like.
Before the girls, I think I would have panicked or got frustrated. Or tried to power through it with brute force and a spreadsheet to make sense of things in my head.
Instead, I came in calm. I’d spent weeks with my daughters, feeding them at 3am, doing physio at 6am, learning what patience actually means when the person you’re caring for can’t tell you what they need.
So I sat with Sam, listened properly, and we worked through it together and now we’re more motivated than ever. We landed on what we’re now calling NOVOS 2.1; a new vision for the agency, a new direction, a plan we’re both genuinely excited about. That conversation wouldn’t have happened if I’d shown up as the old version of me.
Fatherhood made me calmer, CF made me clearer, and both made me a better operator.
The takeaway:
Your hardest personal season might be the thing that makes you better at your work but only if you let it change you instead of trying to outrun it.
I spent years outrunning things. The agency got bigger but I got smaller. Now I’m slower, more deliberate, and honestly more effective than I’ve ever been. Not despite the chaos at home, but, because of it.
The two-week-old at the funeral didn’t know she was teaching me anything. But she taught me the most important lesson I’ve learned in ten years of building: the job isn’t the business. The job is being someone worth coming home to.
See you next week.
— Antonio