Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from

parents just like you all over the world. Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Are you bringing this home?

Orville and Wilbur Wright didn't go to college.

They were bicycle salesmen from Ohio.

They weren't engineers.

They didn't have any technical training.

They didn't have much money.

They didn't know anyone who could help them financially or intellectually with their pursuit of becoming the first to fly.

Meanwhile, there were teams of engineers from top universities working on the same problem. One was funded by a grant from the U.S.

War Department. One had some 70 times the personal finances that the Wright brothers did.

How could they have possibly become the inventors and pioneers they became? It began for them with a toy,

David McCullough writes in The Wright brothers, a small helicopter brought home by their father, Bishop

Milton Wright, a great believer in the educational value of toys. It was little more than a stick

with twin propellers and twisted rubber bands, and it probably

cost 50 cents.

Now, it might not seem like a toy could change a child's life, but of course it can.

As Simon Bolivar said many years earlier, a child can learn as much from a stick as any teacher.

Toys are more than just things to play with.

They are worlds to discover. They are things to be responsible for. They are things to take apart and put back together. They are, as we talked about

a while ago, projects that they can throw themselves into. We spend a lot of time introducing our

...