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. It's a long run that we've signed up for. The career opportunities are hard to turn

down. It's hard in the moment, as we've talked

about, to be able to think too far in the future. It's hard to make much in the way of long-term

investments as a parent because you're so overwhelmed with the responsibilities of the present.

We have to keep in perspective that this is a marathon we signed up for. We quoted the baseball

player Anthony Rendon recently about how

he was having to weigh painful but career-alongating surgeries and the grind of continuing to play

against the kind of shape he wants to be in when his kids get older, the kind of relationships

he wants to have with them. Right now, it looks like we're only playing for these next four years of baseball,

Rendon said, but I'm trying to hang out with my kids for the rest of their lives.

And that's a physical and emotional thing.

Can you literally hang out with them and do they want to hang out with you?

There are Wall Street bankers who have so neglected their families as they made their fortunes

that their kids have no interest in spending the summers at the family Beach House. There are runners

whose love of marathons have wrecked their body for the marathon of raising teenagers or

carting around grandchildren. And there are regular folks in between who are burned out,

who have overcommitted, who have just not taken care of

themselves enough. It's a long race that we've signed up for. It's a true test of our endurance. We have

to pace ourselves. We have to prepare ourselves. We have to remember that the choices we make now,

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