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 your role. They're going to surprise you. They're going to be into things and want to do

things that you simply do not understand.

Their music taste will be weird. Where they want to go to college or what they want to study will seem like a bad choice.

Their friends will puzzle you. Your kids, as much as they're like you, will always have some part of them that you just do not get.

And guess what? That's fine,

because that's not your job. You getting it is not that important, or at least it's not the important part. In the Daily Dad book, we tell a beautiful story about the writer Michael Chabin and his

son Abe, who became obsessed with fashion and style. In a fuller piece in GQ, Chabin talks about

watching his son's excitement at a fashion show that he had pulled some strings for them to attend.

He didn't get what his son loved about all of it, but he writes, in time I came to understand

the nature of my job as the father of this sartorial wild child, I didn't need to fathom Abe or his stylistic

impulses. I needed only to let him go where they took him. And for as long as he needed me,

to follow along behind. That is your job. You don't need to understand. You don't need to like it.

You don't even need to enjoy it. You do need to support understand. You don't need to like it. You don't even need to enjoy it.

You do need to support them. You need to encourage them. You need to be behind them as they discover

who they are. Help your children find their people, we say in the June 17th entry in the Daily

Dad. But like Michael Chabin helped his son find the fashion world. But generally,

we're supposed to help them find who they are. That's a whole theme in the book. It's one of my

favorite sections. That's what our job is as parents to help them find and become who they are.

If you haven't read the Daily Dad book, I think you'll love it. It's 366 meditations

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