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.

Rich is how much you get to see your kids. There's a lot of different trappings of wealth.

Big house, nice car, exotic vacations, first class flights, private flights. Not everyone can afford these things.

In fact, that's sort of the point. They're considered fancy and elite because of how elusive they are.

But is this really wealth, or is it just materialism? On Christmas, and it's also the December 25th entry in the Daily Dad book, too,

we quoted Paul Orphalia, the billionaire founder of Kinkos, who defined success as having kids

who come home for the holidays. He was saying that there's lots of wealthy people out there who

don't have that, who are estranged from their family. But what's interesting about this idea

is that it's largely focused on where you

and your kids end up later in life when they have a choice about how much they see you. What about now,

though? What about the choices you're making? Can we really say that someone is wealthy or rich or

successful if the cost of that success is that they themselves are always gone? A rich life is one where you're

able to attend your kids soccer games, where you watch them grow up. A rich person can afford to be

home for dinner at a reasonable time. A rich person might have nannies and an assistant in a big house,

sure, but a truly wealthy person is someone who can afford to put down work for a second and do

these things themselves.

Hopefully what you're gathering here is that this definition of wealth is actually far more

attainable than we lead ourselves to believe. By this definition, stay-at-home parents are

highly paid. By this definition, a booming all-consuming career with an enormous salary is actually

a form of poverty. It's a poverty of time and attention

...