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 have to do better. Our parents did the best they could, but they just didn't know what we know now.

The expectations were lower. They were flawed people. One night, Winston Churchill and his son Randolph

stayed up talking about politics until the wee hours of the morning. Lost in the joy and connection

of it all, Churchill, according to Josh Ireland,

in his book Churchill and son, was suddenly struck by a thought of his own unhappy childhood.

He turned with sadness and said, you know, my dear boy, I think I have talked to you more in

these holidays than my father talked to me in the whole of his life.

Churchill's father, as we've talked about before, was a flawed man, but so too were the standards and practices of his time. Churchill swore he would do better. He wasn't perfect himself,

but he largely succeeded, at least in the areas his own parents had been so defective.

Our job is to do better.

We know more.

The expectations are higher.

We are flawed to be sure,

but we have the benefit of having seen the costs and perils of our own parents' flaws.

And we need to give what we didn't get.

We need to be what we needed.

We need to do our best.

But mostly, we need to do better.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Dad podcast. If you can get this via email every day

...