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.

Have you done this?

When he was a little boy, Harry Truman's father gave him an incredible gift.

In one sense, it was a physical and financial thing.

The Truman family saved their dimes in the 1890s and sent away for a copy of Plutarch's lives.

Had a bright red cover and his father would read it aloud to his son, who's fascinated by the stories of the great men and women of history. I'll always be grateful to my father for

introducing me to Plutarch, Truman said. The things that you happen on in an early age like that,

stay with you for the rest of your life. So the simple version of the gift was that.

We wrote over at Daily Stoak a few years ago about the personalized and inscribed edition of

Plutarch that one former U.S. president gave his son. It's a gift that all parents should give

their kids, as the stories that Plutarch tells us of Caesar and Cato, the Spartans and the

Spartans and the Spartans women, Demosthenes, and Alexander,

these have been influential to generations of leaders and thinkers for a reason.

And there's actually also a great little collection I read recently.

Plutarch is called How to Be a Leader, which you carry at the painted porch.

You should check it out.

Anyways, these stories force you to wrestle with the big questions,

and like Shakespeare's characters, to examine the virtues and vices of the movers and shakers

of the world. But the real gift, of course, was that this was where Truman's love of reading came

from. He may have been one of the only U.S. presidents not to go to college, but he was unquestionably one of the country's most well-read leaders.

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