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 two most important skills to teach your kids. Gerald Ford followed an unlikely path to the presidency.

He was born in 1913 to a family that was soon torn apart by divorce, which is quite uncommon at the time.

He could barely pay to put himself through college. But he was good enough at football that he got offers to play in the NFL.

He fought in World War II. While he did attend the University of Michigan and then Yale Law School,

when he ran for and was elected to Congress, he was in the middle of the pack. Through a series of

quirks, he ended up the first and only unelected president in American history. And looking back on this

surreal rise, one of his main regrets

came from the course of study he took in college. He would write in his memoirs that if he could

go back, the two main things he would have studied would have been learning to write well

and how to speak confidently and articulately before an audience. These were the two main

skills he used in every facet of his life,

and they were the two things that he and most students

seem to get the least instruction in.

It's interesting to think that with all that's changed since Ford went to college,

he was the class of 35.

These two skills remain paramount.

As he said in his memoir, published in 1979, nothing is more important

in life than the ability to communicate effectively. Yet we dance around these subjects. Indeed,

we teach square dancing in elementary school PE, but speech and debate are optional extracurricular

...