your odyssey
the odyssey: three lessons from a 2,700-year-old map
A 2,700-year-old poem just opened in IMAX theaters worldwide — and it is spectacular.
Think about that. Nobody knows what the next five years look like. AI, careers, the very pillars of human activity — all in motion. And the biggest cinematic event of the year is a story older than Rome.
When everything is changing, the things that never change become the most valuable.
The Odyssey is a cornerstone of Western civilization, alongside the Bible. Every hero’s journey you’ve ever loved runs on its template. Christopher Nolan and some of the finest actors alive make it spectacular. But spectacle is the smallest thing it offers.
Meet yourself in this story and you get a shot at becoming someone better.
I watched the film. Before I did, I spent hours in the history behind it. And one insight explains why the poem has lasted: we want a hero and a villain — one way right, the other wrong.
Homer tells us we are both hero and antihero, and the best we can do is be more of one than the other. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Choosing your tradeoffs well is the whole game.
Here are three timeless lessons I took away.
1. the call will cost you. the refusal will cost you more.
Odysseus tried to dodge the war. He feigned madness, sowed his fields with salt, anything to stay home. The greatest adventure in Western literature almost didn’t happen because its hero wanted to stay comfortable.
If you’re like me, you’ve felt your calling for years. Success, stability, comfort make refusing it easy. Every year of waiting feels like the responsible thing to do.
But dreams don’t die dramatically. They die in the waiting for the right time, which never comes.
Answer the call and storms are guaranteed. Cyclops, sirens, shipwreck. But the storms also produce the you who returns to Ithaca — the one who can do things the you who never left could never do. The battles and the scars are part of the gift.
Even if the call is unclear, confusing, persistent — answer it.
I often second-guess my proclivity to rush into adventures that cost me. I almost always land in the same place: answering the call, and paying for the adventure, made me who I am.
2. glory devastates. service builds. hiding does neither.
In the underworld, Odysseus meets Achilles — the most glorious warrior who ever lived, the man who chose a short, glorious life over a long one. Achilles tells him he’d rather be a poor farmhand alive than king of all the dead. He got everything glory promised, and it was worth nothing.
Then Odysseus makes the same mistake in miniature. He defeats the Cyclops with pure cunning, sails away — and can’t resist shouting his name from the ship. That one flex summons a god’s curse. He left home with twelve ships full of men. He returns as the only survivor.
Me-centric actions will devastate your life every time. At the peak of my ego years, entertaining millions as an artist, I learned the cost and rebuilt toward a service-driven life.
But there’s a second ditch on this road, and I see accomplished people in it constantly. They’re so afraid of looking self-seeking that they never build at all. They call it humility. It’s fear wearing better clothes. I did that for years too, and had to shed the fear to lean into calling.
The second ditch is more dangerous, because it’s masked as a virtue.
3. love makes every decision directionally correct.
Odysseus had no map. Twenty years of wrong turns, dead ends, and detours through hell itself.
Then the ultimate test. Calypso, a goddess, offers him immortality. Eternal youth, eternal pleasure, zero storms. He sits on her beach and weeps for Penelope. He chooses a mortal woman, an aging body, and a brutal road home over living forever.
That choice is the entire epic in one scene.
I come from three generations of broken homes. At 26 I made one central decision: I will probably fail at many things, but I will not fail at marriage. Deb and I are approaching 28 years. She takes my breath away every day. She is the home in every way — the north star behind every move I make. This one thing has never failed me.
You want certainty before you move — a guaranteed roadmap, the next five years de-risked.
That’s never coming.
What’s available is better: a why anchored in love. For the people you serve, the family you adore, the work itself. Love makes decisions directionally correct when nothing else is clear.
This is not in the movie, but here’s one image Homer saves for the end of his epic poem.
Odysseus finally stands in his own house after twenty years — and Penelope doesn’t run to him. Twenty years of suitors and impostors have taught her caution. So she tests him. She orders a servant to move their marriage bed out of the bedroom.
Odysseus erupts. Because he knows that he built that bed with his own hands, carved from a living olive tree still rooted in the ground beneath the house. It cannot be moved. And only the two of them know it.
That secret is how she knows it’s really him.The thing they built together that cannot be moved.
The bed is the marriage. Made by hand. Alive at the root. Anchored too deep for any storm to drag out of place.
If there’s one overarching lesson in the Odyssey, it’s this: Adventure gets you out the door. Only love gets you home.
Build your bed from a living tree.
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