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. Now is the time to get it together. Look, when you were young, you could get away with it. You could

spend more than you had knowing that you'd figure things out later. You could be selfish because

you were the only person that really counted in your life. You weren't expected to have it together.

You were expected to make mistakes and learn by trial and error. But now, now that's not such a good look.

The world isn't as forgiving. There is not so much time. There are other people that bear the

consequences of your decisions now. The things we used to look to our own parents for advice about,

money, how the world works, planning for the future. We're those people

now. We're the people who have to be teaching our kids those things. So we damn well better get

serious about figuring it out ourselves. It is said that the average American doesn't have more

than a few hundred dollars to put together in an emergency. For some people, that is a

statement about income inequality and bad luck. For a good chunk of those people, though, it's an

indictment, evidence of immaturity and irresponsibility and bad habits. These are people who make

plenty of money, but they are, as Churchill's mother once said of him,

perfect sieves for it. They're still acting like kids, expecting someone else to bail them out,

telling themselves the time to get serious is later. No, it's now. You're the adult. The future

is not the time to get serious about your finances, about reining in your spending

or saving for college or retirement. The best time for that was yesterday. And the second best time

is now. I actually get that question a lot. People want to get better at money. People who

say, I've been trying to get it together. Where should I start? So that's why we built

...