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. Remember how it feels. In the classic novel Bright Lights, Big City, the narrator flashes back to the scene of his mother's deathbed.

Battling cancer, aware the end is near as she takes just enough pain medication to be uninhibited but still lucid.

The walls between them fall away.

They talk openly about things that they never managed to broach

in life without embarrassment. They talked about sex. They talked about love. They talked about their

fears and worries. They shared their insecurities and their feelings of inadequacy.

You described the feeling you'd always had of being misplaced, the narrator says of himself.

It's kind of a unique book. It's in the second person. He says, of standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world, even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt, that you always believed that other people had a clearer

idea of what they were doing and didn't quite worry so much about why. And his mother heard him

and she saw him in a new way. He went on to explain about how on his first day of school he'd been

so scared and nervous that he'd run and hid in the woods

missing the bus and eventually returning to his house his mom drove him to school where he arrived

almost an hour late everybody watched you come in with your little note the narrator says and heard

you explain that you missed the bus when you finally sat sat down, you knew you would never catch up.

Don't you think everyone feels a little like that? His mother says in reply. Yes, yes, they do.

All kids do. All of us do. But the terror, the struggle particularly when we are young, is that we are

alone in this feeling. We don't realize that everyone feels a little like that. We are,

as the author wrote, standing to one side of ourselves, judging ourselves, judging that we are

behind a part indifferent and not good enough. As parents, we have to remember this feeling.

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