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 not possible without struggle. At an event for female judges in the 1980s during Sandra Day O'Connor's

first term as the first female Supreme Court justice, a law professor asked, how do you take care of

your family and have a career? Always put your family first, O'Connor answered. It was an

inspiring answer, but all the trailblazing women in the room understood that it was not the full answer.

"'No one gets to the absolute top that way, especially not back then.

"'As Evan Thomas would write in his fascinating book on O'Connor, first,

"'the women in the audience suspected that the real

answer to the question was, by constant struggle, by painful choice, and tradeoffs.

They were looking for a story, he wrote, about her own sometimes amusing battles with the

male-dominated legal establishment, or how she had r raised home to feed the kids after school before

working late into the nights, or at least clarified what she meant, given that she herself had

raised a happy family on the way to the top. Indeed, later in life, O'Connor would talk about

how desperately hard it was to balance work and family. She would try to teach her law clerks,

male and female, about this struggle. Even later in her career, well after her children were grown,

she would model it with her husband, who was dying of Alzheimer's disease, by bringing him

into the office with her most days, so they could be together and she could watch over him.

But in those early stages of her pioneering

career, she did what a lot of us do. She was glib. She glossed over the obvious difficulties.

She pretended everything was copacetic. You could call it heroic. You could call it humility.

...