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.

There are better forms of motivation.

When you look at champions in sports or politics or business,

it's hard not to detect a theme running through a lot of their motivations. Many of these

superstars, be they men or women, are fighting for something. They want the approval of their father.

They want to prove their worth to their families. They want to feel loved.

They want to show that the doubt they experienced young or the trauma they endured when they were a kid was wrong and that they have survived and triumphed over it.

It's hard not to see that this is real and productive fuel.

It should also be hard as a father to see it, period.

Because there are so many other forms of fuel out there that don't involve pain, that don't involve what was, in many cases, a kind of

abuse. Michael Jordan was undoubtedly made a better basketball player by the belief that if he could

win enough games, he could earn his father's approval. But don't you think

billions of dollars in screaming fans was pretty good motivation too? Tiger Woods was set up to

succeed in golf by his father's own regimen of hyper attention as well as neglect. Did that help him?

Sure. But given how incredibly talented and smart and hardworking tiger is,

don't you think he could have at least gotten close to that without being essentially tortured as a prisoner of war?

Did Lyndon Johnson's mother's freezeouts drive him to perform and to crave approval and high office?

Absolutely. But being president is pretty attractive

and gratifying in and of itself. You can subject your kids to hard and difficult things,

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