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.

This is a chance to learn.

There is nothing that can prepare you for being a dad as the cliche goes.

No book, no class, no amount of seeing your own parents or siblings do it. So one way to look at

this thing is that it shows you how little we know. The other way, the more positive way,

is to see it as something that teaches us. Being a father is an opportunity to learn,

to learn all the things you didn't know how to do before to acquire all the skills you never

even knew you might need. Shane Parrish, a former intelligence operator and the founder of

Farnham Street, one of the best blogs and

newsletters out there, is a parent of two. As he explained to us, being a dad has helped him

see the world again through curious, playful eyes, that yes, fatherhood is about teaching,

but primarily about learning. From a selfish perspective, he said, fatherhood is an incredible

mechanism to learn skills and develop attributes through lessons I'm not sure I would have gotten

anywhere else. Waiting at the DMV patients and listening to your child practice the recorder

patients are not even in the same zip code. As a father, you get plenty of

opportunities to put other needs before your own and care for another's physical and emotional

well-being and practice true unconditional love. Being a dad is a humbling, overwhelming thing.

Nothing can prepare you for it, but also it can prepare you for life like nothing

else. It begs you to learn. It gives you opportunity after opportunity to acquire and practice new

...