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 need so little now. We had this idea of what we wanted, what we needed our lives to be,

how much money we wanted to make and through what career path. We wanted a new house. We wanted to go

on trips. We wanted to live somewhere exciting and interesting. We wanted to do cool stuff.

We demanded a lot out of life. We had high expectations and also a kind of fragile entitlement. If there

was traffic, we'd get pissed. If our flight on the way to that trip was delayed, we were pissed.

The concert wasn't amazing. We were pissed. But this is all we thought we needed to be happy.

We needed everything we wanted and we wanted everything to go right. But now, once you have kids, there's this shift.

That youthful narcissism, that jaded cynicism falls away. I used to need so much to feel any kind of

happiness in the day, the comedian John Mullaney recently said, if I see a garbage truck with my son,

now we're both psyched.

This was a guy who used to need cocaine to feel alive.

And now he's hiding behind a tree with his two-year-old at 5 a.m. in their pajamas, just watching it like they'd spotted an A-list celebrity at the mall.

All we need now is them.

All we need is the ordinariness of life.

Because to them it is not so ordinary. All we need is the ordinariness of life, because to them it is not so

ordinary. All of it is wonderful and insane and incredible, a helicopter flying overhead, an ice cream

cone from a drive-through, some dumb cartoon over and over again. We need so little to feel happy

to get everything we ever wanted now. I think there's very few of us, especially those of us who

have kids who are like, I get too much sleep, right? A lot of us are struggling to get a good night

...