[Photo by Joel Moysuh on Unsplash]
The Odysseus Files, Issue 10
Architecting Your Ithaca, Part 3
Breaking Up With Chaos
[Note: this is Part 3 of a miniseries within the broader Odysseus Files called “Architecting Your Ithaca.” These miniseries will group broad topics thematically, helping you connect the dots between them more easily.]
TL;DR - Scroll to the end for the takeaways!
Spend any time in the news (or social media, for that matter…) and you risk feeling your throat start to clench, just a little. Your chest tightens up a bit. You can feel the anxiety lapping against you, like the water level when the tide comes in.
You put your phone away, but it’s too late. Your brain has already gone there. You can viscerally feel the presence of chaos slowly stealing the breath from your lungs.
Whether it's wars or natural disasters that cost lives, or horrible crimes that defy reason, or angry bickering over political disagreements, or even your rising weekly food budget, we can all feel that our world is shifting, in some potentially very permanent ways.
You can feel this in your business too: it’s getting harder to get attention, to stand out amidst the noise. Chances are, your number one focus includes two looming numbers: how much you think you’ll clear in revenue this month, and whether that will be enough to pay the bills.
As pressures rise, the tension they create squeezes our horizon narrower and narrower, until all we can see is what’s right in front of us.
Meanwhile, back on the big picture stage, when we encounter signs of the chaos that is outside of our control, we tend to respond in one of two ways:
We go into “bunker mode.” There’s nothing wrong with being prepared, but survivalists take it to the next level: they hunker down, waiting on doomsday, isolated from community, exclusively watching out for themselves and their families. If their fears ever come true, maybe they survive, maybe they don’t, but at least they can say “told you so.”
We shut it all out. Pretend like it’s not happening, or at least can’t happen to us. This is “optimism bias,” a cognitive bias where we think the bad things happening to other people are more likely to affect them than us.
In both of these cases, we become laser focused on our own tiny little world: either trying to save it from whatever doomsday scenario we’ve imagined or just hoping to make it to the end of the day without collapsing in a puddle of anxiety-ridden blubber.
But what if there were a third possible response?
One that, though it may feel scarier in the moment, ultimately creates greater benefits for ourselves, our families, businesses, and communities.
That’s what we’re covering today.
Choosing Your Own Path
This miniseries is titled “Architecting Your Ithaca.” One of the tenets here in The Odysseus Files and in the broader Acropolis Publishing universe is that our businesses support our lives, not the other way around. This means getting clear on what matters in our lives plays a key role in defining how we build our businesses.
Ithaca is a reference to Odysseus’ homeland: his beloved kingdom where his wife and son remained while he was away at war. For 10 years he strove to get back to it, fighting against the will of Poseidon, the temptations of distraction, and the dangers of a chaotic world.
To other’s eyes, Ithaca wasn’t much to look at. It was a tiny kingdom on an island off the western coast (the Adriatic side) of Greece - far removed from the power centers of Sparta, Athens, Thebes and Mycenae on the mainland. In The Iliad, Homer lists all of the Greek commanders and how many ships they brought, creating a sense of the manpower available to each Greek kingdom. Odysseus’ contingent was in the lowest 20% for size, numbering only 600 men (less than 1% of the total Greek army). Clearly, Ithaca wasn’t very populous either.
Regardless, to Odysseus, Ithaca was all he really wanted.
In the same vein, your Ithaca - your vision for your life and business - is your own. It doesn’t need to look like, be as big as, or impress anyone else.
One area that often gets left out of people’s thinking on what they want in their lives and businesses is defining the impact they want to have and the legacy they want to leave. We’re obsessed with what we think we want or need, but don’t take the time to think longer term.
But thinking longer term is exactly what we need to do if we’re going to choose the third response mentioned above.
What Happens Next?
In the first three issues of The Odysseus Files, we covered the story of the Bronze Age Collapse and its relevance for today. (Refer back to Issues 1, 2, and 3 for the full story.) We highlighted how, once the old power structures had crumbled, individual entrepreneurs, trading coalitions, city-states, and small kingdoms stepped into the power vacuum to reestablish trade routes and, through them, civilization.
The lesson being that within chaos, collapse, and change, there is opportunity.
This is the third way - the path of choosing to remain alert to what’s happening around us, to not let our responses be based in fear or overwhelm, but instead to take responsibility for architecting what happens next.
What happens after collapse? We get to decide, if we’re ready.
Even without an actual collapse, doing the work of taking responsibility for what comes next will help us build resilience within the chaos.
But more importantly than simply building resilience in our own lives (shifting dangerously close to a prepper mindset), this puts us in a place to choose the impact we want to have on others, as well as the legacy we want to leave behind.
Optimizing for Impact
Imagine your life, summarized in a profit and loss statement.
On one hand, the value you add to the world. On the other, what you take.
A kind word vs a harsh one
Time with your kids vs spent on your phone
An extra dollar given to charity vs used on yourself
A minute to pick up the trash on the road vs adding to the pile
Creating a product that can transform someone’s life vs hours spent watching TV
The potential for positive impact that your life has is like revenue, while the resources you require to exist are like costs. If the former is greater than the latter, your life has created a net profit in benefit to the world.
Costs aren’t all bad, of course: some are merely frivolous. Some are requirements: you can’t get rid of them entirely; you need to survive & raise a family in today’s world, after all.
And there are nuances: a movie and ice cream date with your daughter beats an afternoon spent working at your laptop, which in turn beats bumming around the house watching TV with a pint of ice cream by yourself.
Regardless, being intentional about reducing your costs to the world while increasing the value you add is THE core formula to crafting a legacy that actually matters.
Reduce your footprint, expand your impact.
But, of course, you can do more than just reduce what you take; you can pair this with increasing the value you give. This is where last week’s issue on the Ownership Principle comes in: approaching your business from the standpoint of an owner-investor who is buying/building assets that create leverage.
Many people live their lives as net takers. In many cases it’s not a matter of “fault,” so much as it is the difficulty of getting around their circumstances. But those who combine these approaches, of reducing your footprint while expanding your leveraged ability to create impact, operate as a net giver. And this is how you maximize your Return On Life Lived.
Takeaways
We’re up against a lot of chaos. In our personal lives, our businesses and the markets in which we operate, and in the broader world around us.
We can choose to respond to this chaos by burying our heads in the sand and ignoring it, by becoming fearful and adopting an isolationist prepper mindset, or by facing it head on with the objective of seeking opportunities within the midst of change.
Choosing the latter necessitates that we optimize for impact: that we reduce our footprint (the “cost” that the earth and society bear by our lives) while expanding our owner-investor mindset, opting for long term thinking, asset ownership, and leverage.
Optimizing for this in our lives and businesses puts us in the best place to craft a powerful legacy. This is what we mean when we say that we’re building businesses to support our lives and legacies, not the other way around.
P.S. - Does this idea of impact and legacy resonate with you at all? Hit “reply” and let me know.