Yes, you’re gone a lot. Yes, you work a lot. Yes, you’re preoccupied. Yes, you are stressed.

But it’s all for a good cause: You are building something. You are making money. You are providing. You are pursuing greatness. You are making something of yourself. You are helping make a better world, a better future for your kids.

Or so you tell yourself.

“Father,” Julia asks Augustus in John Williams’ fascinating historical novel Augustus (grab at the Painted Porch), “has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?” Augustus, weighing the sacrifices and compromises he had to make in order to become emperor, looked at his daughter for a long time. Then, turning away, he said, “I must believe that it has. We both must believe that it has.”

It’s the timeless tradeoff. The same flawed bargain that we all make, that powerful and successful and ambitious people have always made…and almost always come to regret. A bargain whose consequences, it must be said, are rarely born by the people who made the choices.

We say we’re doing all this for our families, but are we? Augustus, in order to preserve his power, would end up having to exile his own daughter—just as power would take Marcus Aurelius away from his beloved wife and, as we know, wreck his son Commodus. We’ve talked about Churchill’s family. Indeed, there are few great men and women with happy home lives.

Was it worth it? They probably told themselves it was. Did they actually believe it? They had to…because the pain of the truth was too much to bear.

Why do you think it will be any different for you?