[Photo by Constantinos Kollias on Unsplash]
The Odysseus Files, Issue 28
Interlude
Embracing Change
It’s been seven months and 27 issues since I started publishing The Odysseus Files. During that time, as is normal, the concept for what Acropolis Publishing and The Odysseus Files is has shifted and morphed.
For as much as I talk about doing the foundational work in your business before chasing tactics, you may have times where it feels a bit pointless - when you find your vision evolving, or you’re no longer quite as inspired by what you set out to build.
This creates a tension - one that we have to get comfortable living in. On one hand, we need the deep work of figuring out what we want our destination to be. This focuses our efforts, building momentum for long term growth. On the other hand, we need to be open to change (while not letting it tear apart everything we’ve done so far).
Simply put, we’re human. What we want and need from our businesses will evolve. That evolution doesn’t make the foundational work pointless.
If anything, chances are the new version of your vision is more closely aligned to what you want deep down anyway, but couldn’t yet imagine or vocalize when your journey started.
So embrace the change. While still building the vision.
This is the journey I’ve been on these past few weeks.
As a result, I’ve decided to make this week’s issue a manifesto of sorts. A rallying call, if you will, detailing what Acropolis Publishing stands for (and against), its mission, and the long term vision.
While this exercise is helpful as a reminder to myself, its purpose isn’t entirely self-serving. Hopefully, by summing up the philosophy and approach behind the past 27 issues, it will help you to determine to what extent these ideas align with you.
(And if they do, hit “reply” - I’d love to talk to you.)
Without further ado, let’s jump in.
The Manifesto
Purpose
Acropolis Publishing exists to help remove the barriers that make it challenging for parent entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses that are built to last.
These barriers can be broken down into two broad types.
“Start and grow a business” challenges include:
Getting attention in a noisy market is harder than ever
Escaping the centralized control of the big tech platforms (because relying on them can leave your business vulnerable to factors outside your control)
Creating a marketing plan that is aligned, actionable, and actually gets results
Navigating the tumultuous waters of launching a business while raising young kids
“That are built to last” challenges include:
A “hustle & grind” entrepreneurship culture that can’t think past tomorrow
A tactics-first mindset that emphasizes chasing new ideas vs staying focused on building momentum with the ideas you started with
A lack of time and clarity to work on the deeper, foundational parts of your business
Optimizing for what someone else built instead of playing your own game (which leads to burnout)
Building based on a limited business model that lacks leverage
I believe the solution to these challenges is intellectual entrepreneurship.
Philosophy
Intellectual entrepreneurship is about slowing down, being intentional, and thinking long term (building for decades, not just next quarter).
It’s about building from the ground up. And it focuses on alignment: between your business model and lifestyle, between your vision and your growth plan, etcetera.
Intellectual entrepreneurship prioritizes financial sustainability. This means getting clear on what factors contribute to financial sustainability (such as repeat customer business vs exclusively chasing new customers, structuring your business based on your personality and lifestyle vs how you’re “supposed to,” etcetera) and doubling down on them.
Because of this, intellectual entrepreneurship is brand-first rather than tactics-first. It encourages you to start with your brand and align everything else to it, instead of jumping from guru to guru looking for the next “hot thing.”
And, as part of your brand, it promotes crafting a world that your ideal customers can get lost in, wanting to return to over and over. (This concept of worldbuilding in your business isn’t relegated to media or entertainment brands, like Marvel or Disney: the grocery chain Trader Joe’s has accomplished this simply by focusing on a unique approach to stocking their shelves.)
When you build a world both you and your customers enjoy being in, it makes your business so much more resilient to external influences. Because you love what you do and it fits your values, lifestyle, personality, vision, etcetera, you can keep showing up while reducing the risk of burnout. And because people stick around, you can worry less about things like algorithms and 3rd-party platforms and focus on building the best possible experience for them (enriching the outcome you offer, because you now have the time and financial resources to do so).
The higher average customer lifetime value resulting from this approach builds financial sustainability into your business at a deep level. You can spend more to acquire higher quality customers, giving you a competitive edge. The top-of-funnel tactics you choose can be oriented towards qualifying a prospect instead of just shoveling as many leads as possible your way. And the brand awareness and referrals you get from happy customers will feed your marketing (through real organic growth).
(This is why some of the highest performing companies do little to no marketing: the experience delivered by their product and customer service is enough to fuel their business. You even see this with someone who works in the skilled trades: if they show up, do a decent job, and don’t cheat their customers, they’re often overflowing with work.)
The result of all of this is a much more peaceful, value-driven business. One that you enjoy, and that helps you build a lifestyle you love and a legacy you can be proud of.
Values
The above sections hint at several of the values driving Acropolis Publishing: clarity, thoughtfulness, sustainability. Contained within these are a few others: stillness, personal sovereignty, leverage.
But there’s another side.
An emphasis on resilience alone can result in a sort of “prepper” mindset: one that is isolationist and focused exclusively on one’s own wellbeing. However, if we take the idea of sustainability to its natural conclusion, it makes sense that sustainability at the systems level is just as if not more important than at the individual level.
In other words, across nearly every system, domain, or way of doing things in our world, there is a severe deficit of sustainability. If we’re truly optimizing for sustainability, we need to also contribute at the societal level, rather than just looking after our own.
I believe that we all have untapped potential to create an impact - to contribute to a more sustainable system. By “untapped potential” I mean skills, abilities, ideas, etcetera that are not being fully leveraged. Once we unlock those, we can produce outputs at a level that is out of proportion with the resources invested.
Building a sustainable, impact-driven business is the key to creating the leverage needed to unlock this increased capacity for positive contribution.
When you marry the leverage available within the intellectual entrepreneurship approach to building a business with the value of creating impact, you end up with the ability to intentionally craft your legacy.
Building your legacy may be the single most valuable thing you gain from approaching business and life in this way.
As a parent, you’re often caught up in the day-to-day (like a business owner). But when you do take a moment to step back, you recall that your ultimate driving purpose is preparing your kids for the future. To equip them to make good decisions, to help them build character, to empower them to unlock their own potential.
Valuing impact means you’re thinking about preparing them for the future. But it also means you decide you want to play an active role in shaping the future that they’ll have to face.
If this idea of legacy-building seems a little far removed from most of the content and conversations on business and marketing out there, it just goes to reinforce the idea stated above, that intellectual entrepreneurship is about building for decades - even past the end of our lives.
It’s closely tied to the principle of compounding in investing: that, when the time function of investing is respected, growth is exponential rather than linear. If you hold an investment for a year or a decade, the results won’t be all that impressive. But if you stretch your time horizon out to 30 years, now you’ve got some real momentum. Then just imagine the effect of pushing that time frame out to your kids’ retirement.
This impact- and legacy-driven value system is based on thinking through what you want the world to look like in 2050, 2075, and 2100. (If 2100 feels impossibly far away, recall that by this point your younger kids will be starting to make end-of-life plans with your grandkids, who are approaching retirement while helping their kids get started in life. You’re optimizing to help shape what types of decisions your kids, grandkids, and great grandkids get to make at these important moments.)
Acropolis Publishing’s impact value contains within it a suite of other, related values:
Connection and community over transaction-based relationships
Daring and conviction vs following the status quo
Creation over consumption
These are all grounded in playing a long game of your own making.
Story
This is my answer to the question “why sustainability?”
Imagine each “domain” within our world as a wave. It rises to a crest, then drops into a trough. Rises, falls, then rises again. What differs between them is the time between crests:
Tech and cultural trends: months to years
Micro-economic trends (recessions and expansions): years
Political cultures and societal mores & value systems: years to decades
Major demographic shifts: decades (usually, except in cases of mass casualty events)
Macro-economic trends (significant long term shifts in the global economy): decades to centuries
Climate change: decades to centuries
Ecological transformation (e.g., the spread of deserts, the end of an ice age): decades to millennia
The rise and fall of societies: centuries to millennia
Of course, there are major levels of overlap and influence between these spheres. Sometimes, a single event shows up like a blip on a screen: for example, the 2008 financial crisis, while certainly the biggest recession in decades at the time, only temporarily disrupted a 30+ year positive economic cycle. It’s defining, but doesn’t fundamentally change the course of events.
Other times, a single event can play a part in a fundamental shift, usually by speeding up an evolution that was already happening. Often, events of this magnitude are in part triggered by shifts across multiple of these trends happening all at once. The event then concentrates and intensifies the effects of the shifts in these trends. (For example, the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on global trade and work culture.)
Every major shift across one of these domains creates chaos. When multiple shifts overlap, that chaos can appear extreme. That’s why, over the past four years, things have felt like they are changing (at a fundamental level) faster than we can keep up with.
We have three different responses we can make to a changing world:
Bury our heads in the sand and ignore the changes. This might help us deal with the overwhelm, but it also means we aren’t prepared for what’s ahead. We give in to the cognitive bias where we believe the threats and bad things happening to others won’t hurt us.
Become afraid and adopt a prepper mindset. We go into fight or flight mode, with the (understandable) instinct to protect ourselves and those we love. We may build some resilience against external threats, but isolationism does little more than help us survive. And survival isn’t quite as good as getting the most out of our lives.
Choose to embrace the chaos and seek out opportunities within it. While this is the scariest choice, it’s also the one that best positions us to thrive in the midst of change, rather than get bowled over by it.
But choosing #3 is remarkably difficult if you haven’t positioned yourself in the trough to take advantage of the crest. It takes long term planning, an intentional and thoughtful approach, and an ability to maintain focus on your vision while keeping an eye on the shifting sands around you.
It takes thinking like an intellectual entrepreneur.
Symbolism
The Acropolis brand leans heavily into symbolism to convey the narrative and philosophy above. Some of the more prominent examples:
The Trojan War: Some 3,200 years ago, the world of the ancient Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean had many similarities to ours today. It was a highly interconnected system of advanced societies, built on trade networks that linked powerful, centralized states.
Yet, over the course of just a few decades, the golden age of the previous 300 years suddenly came crashing down, in what scholars refer to as the Bronze Age Collapse.
Though the causes of the Collapse are complex, poorly understood, and still debated, what’s clear is that the framework this world was built on was fragile. Enough so that when multiple overlapping shifts occurred (from climate change and drought to migration and wars and more), the system imploded.
This story of chaos, conflict, and response is symbolized in the mythologized story of the Trojan War, the subject of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (and several other, related literary pieces known as The Epic Cycle). Whatever fragments of or inspiration for the Trojan War story that are historical are believed to have taken place right around the beginning or middle of the Bronze Age Collapse - making it a perfect micro picture of what was happening on a grand scale in reality.
And thus a perfect picture for the world we live in now, the chaos we’re surrounded by, and the choices we make that shape our response.
The Odysseus Files: The name of this newsletter is drawn from Odysseus, one of the Greek heroes during the Trojan War. On one hand, Odysseus represents the thoughtful, intentional approach that inspired the “intellectual entrepreneurship” philosophy expressed above.
On the other hand, his story in The Odyssey - a telling of his long journey home to his beloved Ithaca after the war - embodies the journey we are all on, as entrepreneurs seeking to navigate to our own version of Ithaca (our visions for our lives and businesses).
Ithaca: Unlike Odysseus’ Ithaca, our own will evolve and grow with us. For us, it’s more about the journey than the destination. But at the same time, defining a destination gives meaning to the journey, otherwise it risks meandering as much as Odysseus’ did. Without a destination (even if it does morph over time), there’s no navigation. Which means we exist at the whims of the winds and waves of life. (Or, in Odysseus’ case, of Poseidon, but that’s another story.)
Acropolis: And finally, as you know if you’ve followed The Odysseus Files for any length of time, the term “acropolis” is the ancient Greek word for the citadel of a city, the center of governance, religion, and defense. It provides a framework for building a sustainable business (and life) that centers around brand and worldbuilding (as discussed in the philosophy section above). If you’re not familiar with this model, go check out issues 12-16 and 18-21 in the archives here.
That’s a wrap for this week. My challenge to you: spend some time in the next week or two working on your own manifesto for why you do what you do. If you do, I’d love to see it.