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.

Do your future self this favor. At some point, you will look back at this moment in your kids' lives

with the misty wistfulness of nostalgia. Doesn't matter what the future holds for them or what

paths they take. You will look back at this time with a sense of longing. It's just a fact,

because they'll never be two again or 12 or 25. You only get so

many bedtime, so many baths, so many drives to school, so many vacations, so many evenings on the

couch, so many times in the garage trying to fix something they asked for your help with. And again,

that's assuming everything goes well. But what if there's a tragedy? What if there's a

mistake that can't be undone? What if you lose them earlier? They lose you early. In the end, we will all

wish we could go back in time. Well, that can't happen. But there is a way, as Adam Rubin,

the author of Dragons Love Tacos, one of our favorite children's books, explained on the Daily Stoic podcast.

He said we can travel to the future, or at least speak to the future.

We can, by the choices we make today, tell ourselves that we did everything we could, that we soaked it in, that we didn't rush through it,

that we told them what they meant to us. Reflecting on the loss of her son, Francis Gunther said

that she wished she'd loved him more. But when you read, Death Be Not Proud, the memoir of

that family's loss, you can also see that that really wasn't possible. If there was any silver

lining to be found around the black cloud of loss, it was that they loved and lived with their child

as much as humanly possible. And while it may have just been a sliver of comfort as they mourned him,

that sliver undoubtedly grew to become a part of them as the years passed, fusing with their

memories of their beautiful boy. Do your future self the favor of a lifetime. Don't take this

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