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 takes a team. It's impossible to do this all, isn't it?

We have all the tasks, the responsibilities, the aspirations that we've always had, eating and sleeping and working and paying our taxes and taking out the trash and following our dreams.

Now we have little people to care for on top of all that.

Little helpless people with infinite needs.

How can we do it all?

Ursula Le Guin was a full-time writer.

She was prolific publishing 23 novels, 13 children's books, 12 volumes of short stories,

11 volumes of poetry, five essay collections, and four works of translations. Additionally, she worked as an editor and taught college undergraduate classes.

Oh, and she was the mother of three and the wife of a history professor, Charles Le Guin.

So how did she do it all? How did he do it all?

She and he didn't.

One person cannot do two full-time jobs, Le Guin once explained. Writing is a full-time job,

and so is children. But two people, she said, can do three full-time jobs, and that's why I'm so strong

on partnership. It can be a great thing. Parenting is so hard to do alone, so hard. One only needs to ask generations of mothers across history

how they fare to understand how true this statement is.

And one only needs to examine the career trajectories

of centuries worth of men to understand

how much they benefited from this matris-centered arrangement.

But of course, we are stronger when we are children's parents,

...