They Can Help You With Your Most Important Job

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

0:37Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? Can I make my sight softer? Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that. Cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your Sleep Number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. It's the final days of our Black Friday sale. Recharge this season with a bundle of cozy, soothing comfort. Now only$17.99 for our C2 mattress and bays, plus free premium delivery.

1:11Prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Check it out at a Sleep Number store or sleepnumber.com today.

1:19Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

1:46They can help you with your most important job. We think of the Stoics as philosophers, which of course they were, but they were human beings too, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, and most of all, parents. Marcus Aurelius had over a dozen children. Seneca had one, Cato had a son and a daughter. His daughter Portia was one of the great female Stoics of history. So it should definitely not surprise us that many of the best insights from Stoicism seem to double as parenting advice. Want a more peaceful home? Remember, you always have the option of having no opinion, And Mark Stabulous writes in meditations.

2:19Want to raise a resilient family? Remember, we don't control what happens, but we do control how we respond, as Epictetus tells us. And Seneca is full of tips for parents. Remember to expose them to good role models, he says. Praise them, but not excessively. Show them how to be good sports in winning and losing. And it was this wisdom, this tradition from the Stoics that actually inspired the Daily Dad. I'm holding the new book here in my hands. I'll tell you about it in a second. It was a way to help give parents a way to access this timeless advice, one piece of it at a time, one day at a time.

2:54And I'm really excited because now we have this really cool leather edition. If you've seen the leather edition of the Daily Stoic, I'm holding a leather daily dad. But anyways, let me get into this. Because the more you study philosophy, the more you realize that parenting is a topic that almost every ancient tradition has spoken about. You find lessons in raising kids from Plato, Confucius, and Epicurus. History, too, has helpful wisdom for parents. The lives of Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, Douglas MacArthur, Frederick Douglass, their lives demonstrate so much practical advice for raising kids.

3:27And it's a reminder that as much as things change, there's no more universal experience that we share across time and space as human beings than being a parent. Wouldn't we do well to learn from these examples? Don't parents, no matter where we are on our journey, need all the help we can get? Well, The Daily Dad is built around accessing that advice. As I said, one piece at a time, one day at a time. The idea is you pick it up, you start with the day's date that you grab it, and you pick it up every day. You return to it. You go through it over and over and over again. You linger on these lessons from the master thinkers, as Seneca says, because although the pages remain the same, your kids change, the world changes, and you too change.

4:07I'm really proud of this thing. We've been working on, we use this amazing bindery in London. I talk about having to find this new bindery at the end of Right Thing right now. But the idea is, you know, already seeing some of the well-worn copies that people bring up to me at events of the hardcover, I wanted to make something that could really last at a level of quality. This is not possible on mass-produced books. It's printed on Munkin Cream paper, one of the best papers in the world for books. It's got a genuine leather cover. It's stamped with a gold foil logo. It's got a picture of a father holding his son's hand.

4:40And there's all new illustrations in each section of the book, a sewn red ribbon. It's an amazing gift for parents in your life. Maybe you want one. Maybe you want to give one to your spouse. And we've got a limited run of these for the holidays. So you can grab that at dailydad.com slash leather and check it out. I think it's awesome. I'm really proud of this thing. And here, I don't know if you can hear that, but I'm holding it and it sounds good. All right. enjoy.

5:20Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

6:14And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here? Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.