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.

What game are you teaching them?

There are two kinds of games in this life, finite and infinite games. Finite games

are things you do once and then they're over. Infinite games are more like life itself. It goes on and on and on,

and everything is interrelated and interdependent. People who approach a finite game think about winning.

People who approach infinite games have to think a lot more

about context, about relationships, about reputation, about trust. The former is zero-sum, the latter

is non-zero-sum. When we had Tobias Lutki, the founder of Shopify on the Daily Stoak podcast,

he talked about living life as an infinite game, which is to say playing for the

long term. He also mentioned how tricky it is with kids, because we often send them the wrong message.

We talk to our children about education as if it's an infinite game, he said, that it's about

the love of learning, that it's a lifelong pursuit, that it's about developing into the best

person you can be. We mean this sincerely, of course, but then we send them off with strong

expectations of winning the finite game of first grade. And it only gets worse from there.

We compare our kids' grades to other kids, even to their own siblings. We talk about what grade

level they're reading or doing math at and what

percentile they're in statewide. We obsess over GPA and standardized test scores as if they're all keys to

the kingdom. Of what exactly? We grill our college kids about whether they've found their major yet,

or about whether the major they've picked is going to snag them a high-paying job or not. We say education

...