If You’re Going To Make Something, Make It Beautiful

“Fifty 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 one of the fence panels and told Isaacson the lesson his father instilled in him that day all those years ago.”Ryan explains why beauty goes beyond the surface level, and launches the new premium leather edition of The Obstacle Is The Way, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. The first production run has only a limited quantity, so do not miss your chance to buy this beautiful new edition of The Obstacle is the Way! To order your copy, head over to https://dailystoic.com/obstacleleather. If you order TODAY, it will arrive in time and make for the perfect Father’s Day gift. Please note: if you live outside the U. S., we cannot make any guarantees about when your order will arrive. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 0:33Ryan Holiday?

  If you're going to make something, make it beautiful. Fifty 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 one of the fence panels and told Isaacson the lesson his father had instilled in him one day all those years ago. "He loved doing things right," Jobs said as he directed Isaacson's attention to the 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.

• 1:16Ryan Holiday?

  Even though it faces the wall and nobody 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's career and every product he brought into the world: craftsmanship. "If you're going to make something," Jobs's father taught him, "make it beautiful." And that's why even the insides of Apple's computers, which 99.9% of customers will never see, have their own aesthetic. It's why so many features on Apple computers, even the minor ones, seem oddly satisfying and intuitive.

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  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, are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. And this is a philosophy that we try to follow at Daily Stoic, that I try to follow in my writing. It would be cheaper, for instance, to produce what we make overseas.

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  Instead, each coin in the Daily Stoic 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 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, a book that's introduced millions of readers to Stoic philosophy, though as perfectly good as it was, was painstakingly created in this new form.

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  We found the best Bible manufacturer in the United States and worked with them to produce an edition of Obstacle with a gold-foil-stamped 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. And this took months to accomplish. It took months to watch as it traveled by container ship across the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico into the port of New Orleans. We tracked it with bated breath as the books traveled up the Mississippi River to Chicago, where they were packaged with a letterpress note that I'd signed.

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  Then we paired each edition with the Obstacle is the Way challenge coin, which, as we said before, is handcrafted in the US by a custom mint. The same where they invented the iconic Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety medallions. The point is, if you want to do something, 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 going to do it shoddily? Are you going to produce shoddy things? Or are you going to put the time in? Are you going to be a craftsman?

• 4:50Ryan Holiday?

  Are even the parts that people don't see going to meet the standards that you believe in? Are you going to 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 from his father, because Father's Day is just two weeks away. And the leather-bound edition of The Obstacle is the Way is now on sale. As I said, a bunch of things make this edition special. All-new illustrations on Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. 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 from me.

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  And each one comes with our Obstacle is the Way challenge coin. 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 packaging has. I think it's dramatically improved. But this is the book that's been read by so many people around the world, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to L.L. 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, going all the way back to the year 2012. And it's a limited first edition run, so I hope you can check it out. Get it if you order it here really shortly.

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  You should get it in time for Father's Day. Go to dailystoic.com/ObstacleLeather 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 dailystoic.com/ObstacleLeather. And we also have some premium editions of The Daily Stoic in leather as well. But all this can be personalized as a gift. Check it out at stewart.dailystoic.com.