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.

Don't let this get to you. You were more distracted than you meant to be. It was a rougher day than you hoped.

You were away longer than you were supposed to be. Plans went very differently than intended.

This is the life of a parent. Stuff goes wrong. You screw up. Events screw with your plans.

When we interviewed happiness expert Dr. Lori Santos, she has the most popular

class on happiness at Yale in the entire school's history. It's pretty crazy. When we were talking to her

for the Daily Stoic podcast, she told us the story of the second arrow. It's a story that comes from

the Buddha, and it's pretty simple. Life hits you with an arrow. The problem is that we hit

ourselves with a second arrow right after when we ruminate on our suffering, when we blame ourselves,

when we tell ourselves we'll never recover, when we choose to feel singled out. And nobody does this

more than parents, right? The guilt, the fear that we've done irreparable

damage, the anxiety that turning it into a whole thing with our kids, acceptance would be so much

better. We don't need to respond to their tantrum with the tantrum of our own. We don't need to

beat ourselves up just because we messed up. Things happen. Mistakes get made. Let's focus on getting better.

Let's focus on learning from what happened, not feeling guilty and awful and like the worst

parent in the world because of what happened. The first arrow we don't get to choose,

the second one, that's on us.

Thank you. choose. The second one, that's on us. Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Dad podcast. You can get this via email every day as well

at Daily Dad.com. Please leave us a review in iTunes.

Most importantly, if you know any dads or parents who would benefit from these messages,

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