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.

You have to unlock this.

Clearly, Dean Aitchison's parents did a good job. They raised him to be

diligent enough to get into the best schools. They provided for him. They made him curious. They made him

feel loved and safe. Yet for all his early successes, it wasn't until much later in life, in law school,

in fact, that he was fully unlocked as a human being.

There, he said, with the help of his professors, he was introduced to the tremendous discovery,

the discovery of the power of thought.

Not only did I become aware of this powerful mechanism, he said, the brain, but I became aware of an unlimited mass of material that was lying about in the world waiting to be stuffed

into the brain. It's beautiful, no? And it was this discovery that propelled Dean into being not just one of

the top legal minds of his time, but eventually the Secretary of State, the United States.

Yet it's also a little sad. Dean went to Harvard and Yale. His parents were smart too,

but nobody was able to get him to realize the power of thought until he was at his mid-20s. It's

crazy. Our job as parents is not just to keep our kids in nice clothes and with full bellies,

to help them make this discovery. We have to give them a sense of sheer

possibilities of the limitlessness of what a human can learn and study and explore in the course of

their life. We have to introduce them to the dangerous world of ideas. We have to give them the muscles

to be not only able to defend themselves in it, but to fight and win inside of it. It's ironic that many of our educational efforts

do the exact opposite. We prepare our kids for tests. We bore them with rote learning. We hide

...