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. The sign of a smart kid.

Education these days seems to be about signals. What did you get on your

SATs? How many AP classes did you take? What schools did you apply to? What extracurriculars did you

practice? Even some of the modern strain of political correctness, critics have said, is really just a way

for people to prove that they are more educated than other people that they were taught

the right words for this and that. But of course, most of that is not education. That's school.

That's symbolism over substance noise, not actual signal. So what's a real sign of a smart person?

Well, curiosity is one, as we've talked about. So were other things. Things kids have actually done

made Creed thrown themselves into. Here's another one noticed by the biographer Merle Miller as he

sat down and interviewed Harry Truman, possibly the last American president to not go to college.

As they talked for hours and hours, Merle noticed that Truman mispronounced a large number of

words, which puzzled him at first. Then I realized Miller later wrote that while he had often read them

aloud, he had seldom, if ever spoken them aloud, not even in many cases heard them spoken aloud.

It's like that if you're one of the few readers in town. It's great to hear your kid

come to you with stuff they heard from your teacher. But if your kid is coming to you with words

they discovered on their own, that is a sign they are learning, like really learning. It's a sign

that they're going to be smart, that they have picked up the most wonderful habits in the world,

curiosity, reading, autodidactism.

Do your best to encourage it and never, ever, ever make fun of it.

And I got to say that is one of the toughest things about this podcast is I find myself having to pronounce words that I've never pronounced before

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