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.

This is how you make them smart. We told you the story of Sandra Day O'Connor sending her grandchildren a box of dead cicadas

that she had picked up during their surreal, creepy once in a decade and a half emergence.

Why did she do that?

One of the most important things is that my children and grandchildren are curious, she explained, because if you're

not curious, you're not smart. We don't have control over what kind of brain our kids were born with.

We don't even really control what kind of college they get into. Are they a math kid or an artist,

right-brained or left-brained? That's not up to us. But what we can influence

is whether they're curious. We can encourage this instinct, asking them questions, and rewarding

them for asking their own. We can cultivate the instinct until it becomes a personality trait,

finding all sorts of interesting things and showing them to our kids. And we can demonstrate it,

pouring fuel on the sparks of curiosity they exhibit by engaging with the things we're curious about,

too. We can't make them a specific kind of genius, but we can make them smart by showing them

how to be curious.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Dad podcast.

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