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.

Give them this ambition.

We try to inspire our kids. We try to motivate them. We try to incentivize them. We want them to care about winning. That's why we push them into sports. We want them to go to a good college. That's why we reward them for their grades. We want them to succeed in this world. And that's why we tell them stories of the grades. We want our kids to be ambitious, but the question, as always,

is ambitious for what? Fire them with ambition to be useful, John Adams writes in a letter to his

wife. His biographer David McCullough would say that this is what Adams learned as a child himself,

that it wasn't ambition to be rich or famous that drove him,

but a desire to be of service, to contribute, to leave the world better than he found it.

It can be easy as a parent to default to easier metrics, to latch on, to impressive,

but ultimately superficial goals.

That's why you want your kids to get good jobs, why you want your kids to make a good

living. But we have to remember that this is just a proxy for what actual success is as a parent,

that this is secondary to the most important kind of ambition there is. We want kids who contribute,

who want more than they want money or power to be positive difference makers.

Hey, you're listening to the Daily Dad podcast, one meditation a day inspired to help you do your

most important job, which is be a great father. These are meditations inspired by ancient wisdom,

psychological research,

and just great strategies from normal dads just like you.

Thanks for listening.