Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you

with your most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy,

by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Teach them how to devour like this.

Some parents want their kids to know how to read. We want more than that. We want our

kids to be obsessed. We want them to hunger for books. We want them to read like they're on a mission.

In his memoirs, Winston Churchill talks about how that switch had been flipped in him as a young man.

Someone had told me that my father had read Given with the light,

he said, that he knew whole pages of it by heart, and that it had greatly affected his style of

speech and writing. So without much more ado, I set out upon the eight volumes of Dean Milman's

edition of Given's decline and fall of the Roman Empire. I was immediately dominated by both the story and the

style. All through the long, glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted

stables till the evening shadows proclaim the hour of Polo, I devoured Given. I rode triumphantly

through it from the end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the

margins of the pages and very soon found myself a vehement partisan of the author against the

disparagements of his pompous pious editor. I was not even estranged by his naughty footnotes.

Maybe you remember what flipped that in you. Was it a teacher who brought you over

to a special section of the library and showed you a whole cachet of books that seemed perfectly

fitted for your interest? Was it your father, as it was for Margaret Thatcher, who picked out

special titles and read them with you? Was it an escape from the unpleasantness of the world?

Was it a desire to make something of yourself in realizing how much priceless knowledge was contained in those dusty volumes on the

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