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.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, we don't control the world around us,

but we control how prepared we are for the world around us. We don't control what happened to us as kids, but we control whether we process it,

how we move on, how we respond to it. And therapy, for me, is a tool in that toolkit, and that's where today's sponsor

comes in. BetterHelp is a fully online, affordable, and convenient way to do therapy. They serve over

five million people worldwide. And with BetterHelp, you can access a diverse network of more than

30,000 credentialed therapists with a wide range of specialties,

and you can easily switch therapists at any time and no extra cost. Work on yourself with

BetterHelp and go to BetterHelp.com slash Daily Dad to get 10% off your first month. That's

better, H-E-L-P, BetterHelp.com slash daily dad.

We've heard them. We've met them. They're the parents whose kids are getting tutored in the SATs in middle school. They've been playing the cello since they're five.

They're patting their college resume with community service and extracurriculars.

These parents make us

insecure. They make us question our own assumptions. Maybe they make us just crazy enough to try

to keep up. But should we? The great Paul Graham, the investor behind Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox,

DoorDash, and countless others think not.

Tiger parents, he says, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war.

Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials

while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on

grades. How awful it would be if they

...