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.

You can only pick two. There's a lot we want to do, a lot we can do. We have our jobs. We have our

friends. We have our kids. We have our hobbies. We want to have fun. We want to make money. We want to be

good parents. We want to have it all. Of course, the unfortunate truth is that we can't. The prolific

artist and father of two, Austin Cleon, was asked how he makes time for all of it.

I don't, he said. The artist's life is about trade-offs. And then he added a little rule that we should all keep with us always. Work, family, scene. Pick two. Work, that's your creative output or your profession family that's a spouse kids or in a close

personal relationship and seen seen well that's the fun stuff that comes along with success

parties fancy dinners important friends social media the stuff that looks good on instagram

you can brag about that falls in your lap like a wonderful

surprise offers invitations and perks it'd be wonderful if you could have the run of things in all of these

areas all the time but you can't you can party it up and hang on to a relationship but you won't have

much time for work you can grind away at your craft, be the toast of the scene, but where

will that leave your family? Almost certainly it means they will be home alone. If you're as committed

to work as you are to a happy home, you can keep both, but you will have little room for anything

else, certainly not late nights or hangovers or exotic trips. Being a parent is about making

tradeoffs. From the very second our kids enter the

world, it's their needs versus our wants. And at first, this can be a shock. But once we know what to

say no to and know why, then we can say yes with comfort and confidence to the things that matter,

the things that last, work, family scene. You can have two if you say no to one.

If you can't say no to any, you'll have none.

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