The Daily Dad Quotes

“The biggest impediment to happiness in life is something that many of us picked up very early in our lives: shame. Shame is guilt’s evil twin. Where guilt is feeling bad about things you’ve done; shame is feeling bad about who you are—for things about yourself that you don’t control.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids

“If you’re going to compete with anyone, we should tell our kids, compete with yourself, to be the best version of yourself. Compete over things you actually control. And make no mistake, we should take that advice ourselves. Compete with yourself to be more present, to be kinder, to have more fun with your kids … to beat what you got from your own parents. Focus on the stuff that’s up to you, that can be an example for your kids as they grow into the people you want them to become.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids

“Everything we say, every interaction we have with our kids, is shaping them. How we speak to them informs how they will speak to themselves. If you want proof of this, think about all the complexes and scripts you picked up from your parents—maybe things you’re working on in therapy right now, decades later.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids

“How we do anything is how we do everything is the lesson parents have to pass along to their kids. Leaving a mess isn’t just a mess—it shows that you’re a mess.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“Love is the only legacy that matters. Let’s not point our love in the wrong direction. —Donald Miller”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“But you have to have hope. You have to be optimistic in order to continue to move forward. —John Lewis”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“B = f (P,E) Behavior (B) is a function of a person (P) and their environment (E). Our habits, our actions, our lives, are determined by our surroundings.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. —Gandhi”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“If you want your kids to value learning, if you want them to never stop furthering the education you’ve been investing so much time and money and care and worry into, then we have to show them what an adult committed to lifelong learning actually looks like.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids

“A “‘why’ child”—what a delightful phrase! Isn’t that who we’re trying to raise? A child who knows how to figure things out. A child who isn’t content with taking things at face value, who isn’t satisfied with simple explanations. Can this be annoying? Absolutely. It can even get them in trouble. But curious is better than complacent, and annoying is better than ignorant.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids

“An illiterate world is not a good one, but a world where people unthinkingly believe and accept everything they read is not that much better.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“There is a select group of writers who are accessible to anyone, at whatever age or stage of life—Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy—and then there are those whose significance is not properly revealed until a particular moment. —Stefan Zweig”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“But of course, environment is everything. The right supporting cast is everything. Timing is everything. We have to be patient. We have to be flexible. We can’t stop rooting for them, believing in them.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes. —Erasmus”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“To each,” Winston Churchill said, “there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“Our kids are whom we should want to impress. They’re the ones we should never want to let down. They’re not only the ones we’re fighting for but also the ones whose standards—whose natural admiration and love—we should always be fighting to live up to.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“You will earn the respect of all men if you begin by earning the respect of yourself. —Musonius Rufus”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one. —George R. R. Martin”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“Those kids buckled in behind you—they are absorbing your example and assimilating the lessons that will shape them in the smallest and biggest of ways. From the kind of driver they are going to be to the kind of person they are going to be. They are watching you as you go through the world. Right now. They’re watching you break traffic laws, break promises. They hear you when you lie. They feel it when your actions don’t match your words.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“It is constantly reiterated that education begins in the home, but what is often forgotten is that morality begins in the home also. —Louis L’Amour”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“It is our kids who compel us to do the right thing . . . because they are always watching.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“I really do not want my pictures in your offices, for the president is not an icon, an idol, or a portrait,” he said. “Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“We could say that what he was doing was showing his daughter how to lose with grace. But it was much more than that. He was showing her that external circumstances don’t define us, only how we respond to them. He was showing her how to bear adversity and how to never surrender your poise or self-control.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“I love him very dearly I guess because of his faults which are my faults,” the novelist John Steinbeck writes of his son. “I know where his pains and his panics come from.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute. —Friedrich Nietzsche”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“When you’re feeling insecure and want to be validated, resist the urge to just post more photos of your kid. Ask yourself: Is this really what my kid wants? Is this really healthy or appropriate? Or is exploiting their cuteness just a cheap way to get attention and feel better about myself?”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids

“August 26 It’s Your Job to Check In Nobody steals a scene on Seinfeld quite like George’s parents, Frank and Estelle Costanza. And naturally, nobody makes George more miserable than they do. They are a crazy, absurd set of parents. In one episode, George has to make his weekly call to them, and it’s a task he finds so onerous that he has to prepare things in advance to talk about. The twist, of course, is that George’s parents dread the calls themselves. “And every Sunday with the calls,” they finally complain. In reality, this is precisely backward. Why is George checking in? That’s his parents’ job. Your kids didn’t choose this life; you did. What does that mean? It means as your kids get older there should be none of that “Why don’t you ever call?” nagging. That’s your responsibility. That said, if you want the kind of relationship where your kids do call and check in and share what’s going on with their lives, it starts when they’re much, much younger. When you can’t just expect them to open up and share with you. When you have to check in with them because they don’t know that they’re struggling or that there’s anything worth sharing. Kids simply don’t have the experience or the perspective yet to know one way or the other. When it comes to stuff like this, “just being there” is not enough. You have to seek them out. You have to reach out. You have to gently pry them open. You have to help them realize their own feelings. You have to be more than there—you have to be proactive.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“As parents, it is imperative that we root for them, that we be fans. We have to encourage them. We have to tell them to keep going. That there are more, better things ahead. The world is going to put up enough stop signs, erect enough obstacles, deliver enough heartbreak. We don’t need to add to it. We need to do the opposite. We need to believe in them.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“Pleased but never satisfied. —Michael Dell”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids

“The innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery. —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids