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 that they decide the end of every story.

As dads, one of the hardest things to think about is our kids experiencing hardship.

So maybe we teach them to turn away from the things that are hard, to take the easy way, to forego difficulty whenever possible.

Maybe we teach them to look at hardship as failure as unfairness as the end of the story it just wasn't meant to be we might say there's nothing you can do about it but what if we trained them taught them to see

hardship another way a better way as fuel as a chance to learn about endurance patience

resilience and struggling as an opportunity to buck up endurance, patience, resilience, and struggling, as an opportunity to

buck up and prove their medal. What if we taught them that they didn't have to resign themselves

to hardship, but that they can agree to work with it, that they can decide to make the most of it,

that they can decide to see an opportunity, not an obstacle, that it's only the end of the story

if they decide it is. When Vice Admiral James Stockdale was shot down in Vietnam, he was taken

prisoner by the North Vietnamese. He spent nearly eight years being tortured and subjected to

unimaginable loneliness and terror. He had little choice over the fact that he was shot down or that he

was taken prisoner. When asked how he made it out alive, he said, I never lost faith in the end of the

story. I never doubted that not only I would get out, but that I would prevail in the end and turn the

experience into the defining event of my life, which in retrospect, I would not trade. What Stockdale told

himself and what helped him endure this terrible ordeal and others was that he had an incredible power.

He could decide how he was going to use this experience. And it's a sense of power and agency that he

learned from reading Epictetus, the slave turned philosophy teacher.

...