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're fighting the last war. We've heard them. We've met them. They're the parents whose kids are

getting tutored in the SATs in middle school. They've been playing the cello since they're five.

They're patting their college resume with community service and extracurriculars. These parents make us

insecure. They make us question our own assumptions. Maybe they make us just crazy

enough to try to keep up. But should we? The great Paul Graham, the investor behind Airbnb,

Stripe, Dropbox, DoorDash, and countless others think not. Tiger parents, he says, as parents

so often do, are fighting the last war.

Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials

while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on

grades, how awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects and thereby gave their

kids a distaste for this kind of work by forcing them to do it. Grades are already a grim,

fake world and aren't harmed much by parental interference, but working on one's own projects is a more

delicate, private thing that could be damaged very easily. Instead of teaching

them that the way to succeed in life is through a bunch of arbitrary gamesmanship and

credentialism, which is not true, why don't you put that energy into developing actual skills

they can use in life? Instead of cultivating obscure or even fake hobbies to impress admissions counselors,

why don't you encourage them to find what they actually love and help them master that?

The parents who lead their children into these pointless competitions aren't just trying to

win the wrong game. They're fighting the wrong war. And they're doing it for the wrong person themselves.

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