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.

Help them find whose children they are. Sometimes our kids are just like us. They look like us. They talk like us. They like the same

things as us. They do the same little gestures with their hands. And then sometimes we wonder if these

kids are related to us at all. Maybe they're extremely athletic and we're not. Or it's the opposite.

The nerdy parents have a natural basketball player in the house. The activist

parent raises an ambitious entrepreneur. The introvert brings home an extrovert. It can be baffling and

difficult. It can cause tension and misunderstanding. This must have been how Benjamin Franklin and his

father were, as H.W. Brands writes in his biography of Franklin, the first American, the two never quite got along,

and indeed, many of their arguments stemmed from the simple fact that he was more gifted and

ambitious than his father. As Brand writes, on many occasions, he must have wondered, not literally,

but emotionally, whether he really was his father's son. Just as Franklin couldn't change who his father was, his father could

not have either. But you know what his father could have done? His father could have done a better job

not making his son feel like a weirdo, especially when he knew that his own brother was so similar.

Brand details an incredible scene of Franklin visiting his ancestors in Ecton, a small village

in England, and discovering that his uncle was an inventor and an innovator, a savvy businessman,

an amateur scientist, a homespun local politician. Suddenly it all fell into place. Brand writes

that whether or not his father's son, he was his uncle's nephew. And as it

turns out, Franklin was born four years to the day of his uncle's death. It was like he was the

second coming in the spitting image. Finally, Franklin felt like he fit. Finally, he felt like he

belonged somewhere. The point is sometimes our kids are exactly like us and that's wonderful.

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