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.

These are your five choices. The hot button political issue of the day is parental choice.

In Florida and D.C., Chicago, and California, parents of different political persuasions are

fighting with their school boards, their librarians, their universities over a host of

culture war issues and the right to choose what their kids learn about or don't learn about.

Some of the issues are

serious. Some of them are made up. We're not going to talk about any of them today. Because what is

more important is a more basic bit of parental choice that we all need to think about, one that

ironically, many of these radicalized angry parents totally neglect. They're so busy fighting about

what books are on what shelves that

they're not thinking about issues that are much more important, much more in their control,

much closer to home, to say nothing of what kind of example it sets for their kids to behave

this way in public. The choice we're talking about today is rooted in a famous press conference

that the legendary football coach Nick Saban gave.

Now, we have about five choices, you know, in our life. You know, we can be bad at what we do.

I mean, we can be average at what we do. I mean, we can be good at what we do, which probably

is God's expectation for whatever ability he gave us, or we can be excellent or we can be elite.

And everybody has a choice as what they want to do and how they want to do that.

But if you're going to be excellent or elite, you've got to do special things.

You have to have special intensity.

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