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When you live intentionally, you can discover more about yourself and truly leave a mark. Adam Nugent and Kate Strong welcome Isaac Childs to the podcast. He’s the founder of Rustico. Together, they talk about his challenges in life, both business and health, and how it allowed him to truly be present in the moment. Learn more about how finding balance, gratitude, and presence can set you apart.
Learn More About Rustico: https://www.rustico.com/
Isaac Childs founded Rustico, a leather goods store located in Lindon, Utah, 20 years ago. In this podcast excerpt, he talks about how his passion for travel and journal-keeping inspired the company, as well as the importance of expressing gratitude.
AN: Isaac, tell us about Rustico and where it started.
IC: I was pretty young and still kind of figuring out who I was as a person. I love to write and put things in journals, and I love to travel—those are my two core personality traits. In my travels, I would write down my experiences in these journals, and I realized how much I was growing from writing down these experiences. The frustrating part was that a lot of notebooks and journals that I was using were just getting destroyed because of the way I was traveling at the time. I ended up taking some classes on book binding at BYU and some audit classes, and I basically came up with style of notebook that was hand bound, hand sewn, indestructible, and long lasting. It just so happened to be leather. I wanted the product to be soulful, and that’s how Rustico was created.
Our mission is helping you leave your mark every day while we create authentic, nostalgic, soulful tools and products that become artifacts for your life. We found that people appreciate them and love them because of what goes in them, right? So, they become more than just journals—they really do become artifacts. And the reason why I use the word artifacts is because to me, that is what happens to a thing when you put a soul in it.
We all have this desire to leave this legacy. We want to leave our mark. So, what we’re trying to do is come up with these products that will help you leave your mark every day. We came out with a guided gratitude journal. It’s designed to help in the practice of gratitude. It’s a three-step process.
KS: Do you practice gratitude writing daily?
IC: Yeah, I do. For me, it’s the basis of how everything else really starts, especially when you talk about presence. Having gratitude is a perfect way to bring you into the present moment. Most of the time, when you think of gratitude, you’re usually thinking of past experiences: events, things, or people. But what happens in the gratitude cycle is that once you start thinking about those things, it instantly brings you to the present moment of expression.
