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.

Point them towards what they can change.

Victor Krulock, one of the most revered Marines in the history of the Corps,

remembers the blunt advice his father gave him as a boy.

You will be short and you will be bald,

the short, round, bald man told his son about the reality of their genetics,

but you don't have to be overweight.

It was in that uncomfortably coarse and insensitive way of most parents in the 20s and 30s,

a ray of pragmatic hope that the elder Krulak was offering his son.

Unlike his height or the hair on his head, even if he were genetically predisposed to slow metabolism or a thyroid disorder,

which his father almost certainly wouldn't have been aware of,

Victor could do something about his weight if he felt like it was becoming a problem.

In some sense, we all need to have a version of this conversation with our kids.

They don't control their hair color or their eye conversation with our kids. They don't control their hair

color or their eye color or color blindness. They don't control the breast cancer mutation

that runs in the family or whether they're one of the unlucky ones for whom cilantro tastes

like soap. Despite all our technology and medical advancements, biology is still a destiny in many ways, but all is not lost,

because most of the things that matter in life have nothing to do with biology.

We still have so much control over so much that matters.

So what if we don't come from a long line of savants or geniuses? Our kids get to decide

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