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 Who to Study. We spend a lot of time looking at the absolute worst parents.

Not just because so many leaders and celebrities and artists seem to put their families

absolutely last in order to achieve their success, but because artistically flawed and

tragic figures quite naturally fill up most of the pages in the screen time. As Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina,

all happy families resemble each other, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

That certainly makes for quite a story. But does it have to be that way? Another great novelist,

Ursula Lequin, who we talked about recently, disagreed.

The hell with that, she is quoted as saying in the baby on the fire escape, Tolstoy got it wrong.

They're the ones that are all the same, but a happy family, which doesn't mean that everybody's

happy all the time. The so-called happy family is a fascinating thing,

the interplay of power and control and love and dislike and frustration.

It's endless.

The reality is that there are so many fascinating happy families out there.

Plenty of people who are great at what they do

and present and balanced at home.

And as entertaining as the train wrecks are, we ought to be studying talking about celebrating

the better examples.

Ursula's family being a good example.

We would all be well served by picking some parenting fathers.

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