We want to know how well our kids are doing in school. So we ask the m about their grades. We ask if they need help with their homework. We ask what they learned today in class.
Yet when Isidor Rabi came home from Manual Training High School each day, his mother didn’t ask him about any of that. “Izzy,” she would say instead, “did you ask a good question today?”
Now on the surface maybe that doesn’t seem like much or much different than those other inquiries, but it is. It’s the most important distinction in the world.
Because questions are at the heart of learning and growth. When children learn to ask good questions, they develop critical thinking skills that serve them throughout life. Isidor Rabi, who would later become a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, attributed much of his success to his mother’s focus on questions rather than answers. This approach encouraged his natural curiosity and taught him to seek deeper understanding—to not “be satisfied with just getting the gist of it,” as Marcus Aurelius once encouraged himself.
As parents, fostering a questioning mindset benefits both us and our children. It helps their intellectual development while strengthening our relationship by demonstrating that we value their thoughts and perspectives. We must remember there are no stupid questions from our children. We must remember to avoid being parents who, even when tired or frustrated, resort to saying, “Because I said so!”
Instead, we want to encourage them to ask questions. We want to encourage their curiosity, because it is through that curiosity they discover what a real education is. It’s how they find wisdom—which, in a world full of distractions and superficial thinking, provides our children with an internal compass that will guide them through life’s complexities long after we’re gone.
But wisdom isn’t this thing you’re born with or given—it’s something we gain over time through foundational habits like this. Actually, this story about Isidor Rabi comes from the new book Wisdom Takes Work and happens to be one of my favorite (hey, it’s Ryan here). The book is available for preorder now and it’s all about this key Stoic virtue of wisdom—how we develop it in ourselves but also how we develop it in our kids, which is something I think about all the time.
In fact, we’re on a family vacation right now in Greece because my son got interested in Greek history and started asking us a bunch of questions about it. So now we’re on the road together searching for answers to those questions.
That’s what Wisdom Takes Work is all about. We have a limited amount of signed, numbered first-editions available for you and a bunch of awesome preorder bonuses, like:
- A signed page of the original manuscript
- Invite to a LIVE Q&A with Ryan Holiday
- EARLY access to the Wisdom Takes Work introduction
- Two BONUS chapters from the book
- And you can even have dinner with Ryan at The Painted Porch in Bastrop, TX.
These will only be available to those who preorder Wisdom Takes Work before its official release on October 21, 2025.
Learn more about all our bonuses and preorder the book today at dailystoic.com/wisdom!
