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 the first step. It's pretty remarkable.

In a time when most women weren't expected to be educated, let alone allowed to take a career,

a young woman named Jane Austen managed to write a series of books that not only became

massive bestsellers but are still read and beloved over 200 years later.

How did that happen?

It wasn't just that she was brilliant and talented and creative. It wasn't just that she was brilliant and talented

and creative. It wasn't simply that she was determined and pushed past the assumptions of her

time, and it wasn't just, as we wrote a while back, that her father was a forward-thinking advocate

for her work. No, the roots of her story go back much earlier, something much simpler that her

did for her and that she did for herself.

As Claire Tomlin writes in her book, Jane Austen, a life we can trace the beginnings of Jane

Austin's greatness to her father's library. Their father's bookshows were of primary importance

in fostering her talent, she writes, given that the first impulse to write stories comes from

being entertained and

excited by other peoples. And her father had quite a library, some 500 volumes. It's a crime we've said

to raise a child in a house without books. Our job is to surround our kids with great ideas,

great writers, great art. We can't expect it to turn all of them into groundbreaking creatives,

but it will have some effect on them. And in every case, though, it will give them windows into

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