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.

Teach them how to play ball. The cliche of the good father is playing catch in the backyard with

their boy. Let's put aside the gender stereotypes of this for a second because the metaphor is still good,

at least according to the Stoics who believed that playing ball was the most important skill a person could have.

The Stoics were referring to a different kind of ball, though. Epictheus wrote quite beautifully

about his admiration for skilled athletes who were about to catch a ball that was thrown to them and

whip it right back. They didn't complain. They didn't demand certain conditions be met before they

dove for it. He admired their concentration, their coolness under pressure, their grace, their creativity.

In his view, Socrates was such an athlete,

not just because he was quick with the back and forth banter, but because of how he dealt with

the difficulties of life. Only the ball in his case, Epictetus said, was life, imprisonment,

exile, or execution, with the prospect of losing his wife and having his children reduced to the status of orphans.

Those were the stakes of the game and still he played and handled the ball with the plumb.

So we must cultivate this skill and pass it along to our children.

Life is going to throw curveballs at us. It's going to whip some fastballs right at our head.

Are we going to take this personally or are we going to figure out how to hit it, catch it, or in other cases, expertly duck. Each of us has to learn how to play ball literally so we can stay in shape, play ball literally, so we can learn the important lessons about winning and losing and having fun with a team. But also figuratively, we have to learn how to play ball

with people we don't like, play ball with adversity, play ball with bad weather, play ball with

unfair rest. We have to do it because our kids depend on it. Our kids have to learn how to do it

because their future and happiness depends on it.

Hey, thank you for listening to The Daily Dad podcast.

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