How many of you are anxiously awaiting the Christopher Nolan version of The Odyssey? I certainly am. My wife recently read The Odyssey to get ready for it, since she hadn't read it before, and it left me with a question. Why has it been so significant? Why has it had such staying power?
Part of the answer is that it sits at the headwater. The Odyssey and the Iliad stand near the source of the whole Western canon, and almost everything written since has defined itself against them. The word odyssey itself became a noun for a long, transformative journey.
The Iliad is all about wrath and glory and death at the peak of war. The Odyssey is about survival, cunning, endurance, and a return. The subject is the nostos, the homecoming, rather than the battlefield. The way I look at it, the journey is almost a journey home to one's self.
In the Cyclops episode, Odysseus calls himself Nobody to survive. Then he can't resist reclaiming his name as he sails away, and nearly gets himself killed for the sake of being known. The back half of the poem is one recognition scene after another. His old dog Argos. The nurse Eurycleia, who knows him by the scar. Penelope, who tests him with the secret of their immovable marriage bed. Coming home means being recognized as yourself, which is different than just arriving at a place.
Home is where you drop the disguise.
I realize this is a very Jungian reading, and a natural fit for me. I'm not sure Jung ever said anything specifically about the Odyssey being a journey home to oneself.
Others entered the poem from something like that same door. Tennyson's Ulysses gives you a restless old king who can't stop seeking. Dante darkly puts Ulysses in the Inferno for his reckless pursuit of knowledge beyond limits. And Joyce's Ulysses maps the whole epic onto a single ordinary day in Dublin, which is the cleanest statement of the thing. The Odyssey happening inside of life, not out at sea.
The first half of a life is the Iliad. If you're lucky, the second half is the Odyssey.
Someone mentioned to me in my 20s or 30s a book called Halftime, by Bob Buford, about moving from success to significance. I also listened to a tape series as a young minister about the two halves of life. I wasn't anywhere near the second half, and it probably didn't make the impact on me it should have. But at some point you come face to face with the number of mistakes you've made. Success isn't final and failure isn't fatal. At some point you look at the mistakes and realize it isn't about the mistakes, but what you do with them.
Sure, I tell my kids all the time that I've piled up a lot of money for their counseling to repair the damage I did as a parent, not knowing any better. And I probably need to make a list of amends, a la the "big book," of people I've hurt, including coworkers and friends.
The next step isn't to leave the arena. It's to walk back in with what the mistakes taught me, and hold the door open so other people can do their good.
I got a tattoo with my son while he was down doing military intelligence school. He's an army officer. He suggested I get the cross of St. James and sent me a picture and said, "The history of the cross is that soldiers protected people on the Camino." If you saw the cross, you knew that person was protecting you on your journey. And he told me, Dad, that's what you've always done. I hope that's true.
That's the homecoming I want. To be a person who protected other people on their journey. A big part of PerLucem is bringing together what I know about the banking industry and what I know about the artificial intelligence industry, and using it to protect the people who protect their local communities.
I've been a community banker at a small bank. We did fifteen transactions. One fell apart. One was a sale at the end. Thirteen were acquisitions. You go to battle and you want to redeem yourself, and part of what you're trying to do is come back home. Maybe, for me, that means helping community banks.
We've talked with a few dozen leaders in community banking, and to a person they say the same thing. They want to do right by their community. They want to grow the bank. They want to be the bank of choice, the trusted advisor. They want to take care of their families, and the families of the people whose businesses they represent. That's the why behind what we're doing. It's about economic vitality for everyone.
And the stakes are concrete. Community banks make close to 60% of this country's small-business loans under a million dollars. If they lose to a big bank's head start on AI and infrastructure, that lending doesn't just move somewhere else. Some of it stops.
Here's the strange part. Global banking just posted the most profitable year in its history, and the market still doesn't believe it, because the profits ran on tailwinds that are already fading. McKinsey's read on what comes next fits in one line: "precision, not heft, is the great equalizer." Size stops being the advantage. Focus becomes it. That's the first time in a long while the game has tilted toward the small bank instead of away from it. And the relationship these bankers all talk about isn't just talk. In the Federal Reserve's own small-business survey, community banks come out as the lender of choice, with higher satisfaction than the big banks, the finance companies, and the online lenders.
The banks we've written about, we've never held up just to point out what's broken. We've held them up to show how a good bank becomes a great one, and keeps going on its journey. Whether that journey is to acquire other banks, to sell one day and return money to shareholders, or to hand the bank down across generations, all three are honorable. All three, today, take a sophistication that is getting harder to find. I believe we can be the lever that gets people where they already want to go. It's why I wake up at 2:30 in the morning thinking about this.
I suppose if you ask a middle-aged moralist to run a company, you get middle-aged moralizing. As C.S. Lewis might have said, though statistically I may be a little past middle age.
This is about the combination of AI and HI, artificial intelligence and human intelligence. It's about pulling the signal up out of the noise. And it's about economic prosperity for everyone. The thing about writing this is that you can't hear the crack in my voice when I talk about these things.
I've always been in the little guy's corner. Now we get to give him a puncher's chance.
There's an idea my daughter Darby carried home from a class that I can't stop turning over. Ecologists talk about two kinds of resilience. Engineering resilience asks how fast a system can snap back to the way it was. Ecosystem resilience asks something else entirely: how well it can reorganize into something new when the old shape breaks. Cling only to the first, to maximum efficiency and the one right answer and the model that has always worked, and you get rigid. Brittle. You shatter at the first real disturbance. Her line for it: befriend the disorder before it destroys you.
It rhymes on three levels at once, which is why I keep coming back to it. A bank that clings to the old equilibrium is the brittle one, and AI is the disturbance. Survival isn't snapping back to how it was. It's reorganizing, and that is the whole point of what we build: the intelligence that lets a bank see the disturbance coming and reorganize instead of break. The same is true of the tools. The point of precision is not to freeze a bank at maximum efficiency, which is exactly the trap. It's to last through change. And it's true of a person. The second half of a life is one man's adaptive cycle. The self you spent years building has to come apart a little and reorganize. Odysseus does not come home the man who left. The homecoming is a reorganization, not a return.
A McKinsey report and my daughter's ecology class arrived at the same truth from opposite ends. The only constant is change, and the antidote is iteration.
And here is the turn I didn't expect to write, selling what I sell. It's about having an analog component to your life. A life outside the screens and the AI and all of it. Hard books, and the digital ones too. Writing on paper, with a pen. The aesthetics and the feel of things. The Odyssey happens inside a life, not out at sea. So does the homecoming.
Tennyson's old king cannot rest from travel, and there is something to that. Steven Pressfield says the work itself is the homecoming. You sit down and do the thing, against all the resistance, and then you do it again the next day. The homecoming was never the arrival. It's the daily return to who you actually are.
I'm thankful to work with people who believe the same thing I do. That isn't lost on me. And I'm grateful for every conversation with a banker who is trying to do right and just needs a few more resources.
Home is where you drop the disguise.
This is me, dropping it.