The Daily Stoic - If You’re Going To Make Something, Make It Beautiful

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast each day. We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics Illustrated with stories from history Current events and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

Starting point is 00:00:40 If you're going to make something, make it beautiful. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashioned forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. 50 years after he helped his father build a fence around their house in Mountain View, Steve Jobs took his biographer Walter Isaacson to see it. Jobs skimmed his hand along back of the fence. He cared even about the look of the parts you couldn't see. A great carpenter jobs learned early wouldn't use even an ugly piece of wood even on the back of a drawer. Even though it faces the wall and nobody

Starting point is 00:01:42 will ever see it, he said, you'll know it's there. So you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, it has to be carried all the way through. This was the defining characteristic of Jobs' career in every product he brought into the world. Crasmanship. If you're going to make something, Jobs as father taught him, make it beautiful. And that's why even the insides of Apple's computers, which 99.9% of customers will never

Starting point is 00:02:13 see have their own aesthetic. It's why so many features on Apple computers, even the minor ones, seem oddly satisfying and intuitive. The Stoics would have nodded in agreement. Marcus Aurelius talked about seeing the beauty of things that are easy to overlook, like the ordinary way that breaking bread splits in places, and those cracks, he says, while not intended in the baker's catch our eye and serve to stir our appetites. It's why meditations, which was never intended for another set of eyes, is still perfectly written in Greek no less. Beautiful things of any kind, Marcus explained,

Starting point is 00:02:53 are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. And this is a philosophy that we try to follow with daily stilett, that I try to follow in my writing. It would be cheaper, for instance, to produce what we make overseas. Instead, each coin in the Daily Stoke store is handcrafted in the United States by a custom mint that's been operating in Minnesota since 1882. Why? Because they make them better, because they've perfected a formula over the last century

Starting point is 00:03:24 and a half. And when we did the leather bound edition of the Daily Stoic, it would have been cheaper and faster for the publisher to produce it like every other book. Instead, the lay flat binding and the ribbon took extra time, even a specialty printer. And the new leather bound edition of The Obstacle is the way of a book that's introduced millions of readers to stoke philosophy that's perfectly good as it was was painstakingly created in this new form. We found the best Bible manufacturer in the United States and worked with them to produce an edition of obstacle with a gold foil stamp to cover, gilded-edge pages printed on

Starting point is 00:04:06 They'll stand to cover gilded-edge pages printed on premium grade paper at their factory in Belarus. We found a designer to create new illustrations to delineate part one and part two and part three of the book. This took months to accomplish. It took months to watch as it traveled by a container ship across the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico into the port of New Orleans. We tracked it with baited breath as the books traveled up the Mississippi River to Chicago,

Starting point is 00:04:29 where they were packaged with a letter-pressed note that I'd signed. Then we paired each edition with the obstacle as the way challenge coin, which, as we said before, is handcrafted in the US by a custom mint. And that's the same mint where they invented the iconic Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety medallions. The point is, if you want to do something,

Starting point is 00:04:52 you have to do it right. If you're going to make something, you should make it beautiful. This is important advice in business, but also in life, you only get one go at this thing called existence. Are you gonna do it shoddly? Are you going to produce shoddy things

Starting point is 00:05:09 or are you gonna put the time in? Are you gonna be a craftsman? Are even the parts that people don't see going to meet the standards that you believe in? Are you gonna delight, as Epictetus said, in your own improvement day to day? We hope so. Become a master of all that you do. And I think it's fitting that Steve Jobs learned this lesson

Starting point is 00:05:32 from his father because father's day is just two weeks away. And the leather bound addition of the obstacle is the way is now on sale. As I said, a bunch of things make this addition special. All new illustrations on part one, part two, part three. There's a genuine leather cover with all new foil stamped logo on the front. Each book comes in a box, so it makes a great gift. Each book has the letterpress letter for me. And each one comes with our obstacle is the way challenge going. The idea is you read the book and you can carry a memento of it wherever you go. The book hasn't changed but the

Starting point is 00:06:07 packaging has I think it's dramatically improved but this is the book that been read by so many people around the world from Arnold Schwarzenegger to L.O. Cool J. Michelle Tafoya winning teams like the New England Patriots Seattle Seahawks the Chicago Cubs University of Texas. It's just a higher quality edition of this thing that I worked so hard on all the way back to the year 2012. And it's a limited first edition run. So I hope you can check it out.

Starting point is 00:06:38 Get it, if you order it here really shortly. You should get it in time for Father's Day. Go to dailystilk.com slash obstacle leather. If you order today, it should get there in time for Father's Day. I think it'll make a great Father's Day gift. Get your copy at dailystoke.com slash obstacle leather. And we also have some premium additions of the daily stoke in leather as well. But all this can be personalized as a gift.

Starting point is 00:07:03 Check it out at store atdailystoic.com. Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. podcasts.

The Daily Stoic - If You’re Going To Make Something, Make It Beautiful

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