Homer's Definition of Toughness

What The Odyssey Can Teach Us About Performance

This weekend, a 2,800-year-old poem had the biggest opening of Christopher Nolan's career. Bigger than Batman, Oppenheimer, you name it. A quarter of a billion dollars, worldwide, for a story your high school English teacher assigned you. One reason, is that while it might seem like an adventure story. It’s really about the traps inside our own head and how to get past them.

At its heart, The Odyssey is one of the oldest surviving maps of pressure, fear, temptation, homesickness, trauma, identity, leadership, and recovery. It’s resonated for millennia because it gets at the human condition, and our own struggles so well.

At its very base is goal conflict. A drive to get home, to see his family, while everything is pulling us in competing directions. Sometimes, it’s shiny objects and temptations, other times its items that pull at our own ego.

It might just be one of the clearest demonstrations of what real toughness is all about. It’s not some macho fearlessness. It’s the ability to keep making the right choice while fear, grief, fatigue, desire, shame, uncertainty, and ego are all trying to hijack you. It’s taking wise action amidst the chaos.

So with that said, let’s take a look at what the Odyssey can teach us about navigating a messy world.

1. Uncertainty is at the root of stress and anxiety

Odysseus is known as a brilliant cunning man. But throughout his ordeal, he’s acting on incomplete information. Half the time he doesn’t know where he is, what god is angry at him, whether his family waited for him, or if home even exists anymore. And he often finds himself in situations with no clear comparison or way out. It’s the basic psychology of stress: an always looming threat, with lots of uncertainty, and much of it beyond your control.

It’s the constant battle of hope. The moment that you let the uncertainty shadow everything else, and throw up your hands because it seems like nothing you do matters, you default to hopelessness. And trying becomes impossible.

You’ve got to get comfortable acting despite incomplete information. You’ve got to learn how to take the leap, despite not knowing whether you still have a shot at your goal or not. You’ve got to hold on to hope, even if the situation seems dire.

It’s exactly what Viktor Frankl communicated in his work on surviving the Holocaust. It’s holding on to the smallest bit of meaning and sense of control.

2. It’s the Numbing That You Have to Watch Out For.

When Odysseus men eat the lotus, they get stuck in a state of pleasant contentment. They forget all about the mission or their desire to go home. It’s so bad that Odysseus has to drag his crying men back to the ships and tie them up. That’s how strong the pull is.

It’s not hard to see the parallels to modern life. There’s the addiction angle, but I think for most of us it’s more that modern life has a tendency to numb us out. We scroll endlessly, get trapped in cycles of watching TikTok videos for hours instead of meaningful pursuits. The feed asks us to care about everything, so we end up caring about nothing. It’s not just our phones, it’s that we design a life of comfort so that we don’t feel anything anymore.

We don’t get the struggle of doing hard things, or of pursuing meaningful relationships, because much of our modern life is designed around avoiding anything with even the littlest friction.

Too often, we think we want ease and comfort, but what we really need is things to make us feel alive. Pursuits that challenge us, relationships that force us to grow. At the heart of living a good life, is keeping the pulls towards avoidance at bay with a strong enough desire.

It’s what Odysseus had. Even when he went astray, that pull or even ache towards home, is what guided him. It’s what kept him alive.

3. You Can’t Willpower Your Way Through Everything

Everyone knows the story of the Sirens. Odysseus had his men tied him to the mast of the ship so he could hear the songs, while his men put wax in their ears and were told to ignore his commands and not to untie him no matter what.

It’s a simple but profound lesson. We can’t grit or willpower our way through everything. Even the great heroes can’t. This is the original anti social media influencer hustle and discipline content. It’s telling us that at some point those things will fail, and you better have something else.

It’s not saying those things aren’t valuable. It’s just that you need to know their limitations. You need to understand when environmental design beats discipline. Or when you need good people around you to prevent you from doing something stupid.

4. Ego Can Sabotage Everything

In one of the more famous stories, the cyclops Polyphemus traps Odysseus and his men in a cave. Odysseus tells the cyclops that his name is “nobody.” After they stab the cyclops in his eye, the monster screams out to other cyclops and when they ask what’s happening, he says “Nobody is attacking me.” So they leave him alone. This cunning move ultimately allows Odysseus to escape.

But then, on their ships sailing away, Odysseus can’t resist taunting the cyclops to make sure that he knows who it was who beat him. The cyclops then prays to his father, the sea god Poseidon, to curse him with a long journey back home.

That’s the reason why Odysseus journey takes 10 long years.

This is the clearest lesson in the book. You can win the battle, you be the most intelligent and masterful. But a tiny slip of your ego, destroys it all. Ego is the engine of self-sabotage. When we prioritize status-seeking over all else, it erodes our judgement and ability to think clearly under stress. It’s really freaking hard to turn off that status and comparison engine.

If you don’t do the work to keep your ego just in check, it’s going to come back to bite you.

Odysseus shows us the way. Being nobody saved his life. But the need to be somebody, cost him a decade of misery.

5. We all need a Mentor

The word “mentor” comes from the Odyssey. It’s as simple as that.

Mentor is an old friend that Odysseus leave in charge of his son, Telemachus, to help guide him from being a timid boy to a capable man. The goddess Athena repeatedly tooks disguises (most famously Mentor's) to guide Telemachus.. But what’s interesting is that she doesn’t just guarantee him victories or rescue him. She does what we now think a mentor does, support and nudge him towards action. She instructs him to speak, to travel, to seek news of his father, to enter adult spaces, and to take responsibility for his house.

It’s the origin story of good guidance and coaching. Treat people as capable, show them the way, but don’t pave the path for them. A good coach or mentors helps move them towards independence, not dependence. They lend belief long enough for the athlete, student, or young leader to build their own.

6. Define Success Well

Achilles was known as the greatest warrior of his time. He was seen almost like a human god. In the Iliad, Achilles tells us of the choice he had to make as a child, “If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love... my glory dies, but the life that’s left me will be long.”

He chose glory over a quiet long life. In the hero culture, it seems like he made the right decision. When Odysseus meets the hero in the underworld, he lavishes him with praise, but Achilles quickly corrects Odysseus, “I’d rather slave on earth for another man — some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive — than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

The man who got what so many craved, an immortal name with poems that echoed for eternity, said it wasn’t worth it. He’d swap all of it for an ordinary Tuesday.

The external is always tempting. The awards, accolades, status, and notoriety seem like they are the ultimate prize. Even now, we sacrifice so much for it. But in Homer’s epics the hero of the Iliad who wanted to be remembered meets the man who just wants to return home intact, and the former is saying love is more important than glory.

7. The Return is the Hard Part

At the heart of the epic is a simple lesson. The war took a decade. It’s what nearly everyone would say is the hardest part. It’s an actual war after all. But Homer’s poem was trying to tell us that it’s the journey back home that is often just as difficult.

Whether it’s the research on modern soldiers struggles and PTSD, athletes and their rate of depression after hanging up their jersey, or the difficulty for folks after retiring. It’s not that you finish the hard thing, and then it’s all joy, bliss, and contentment.

The hard thing changes who you are. You saw it when Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca. He doesn’t just show up as a triumphant king. It’s the same island, but it is no longer the world he left. He’s got to wrestle with how he and the world he once remembered changed.

It’s what every athlete comes to realize.

Andre Agassi: “Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.”

Olympic medalist Molly Seidel: “Winning it and realizing it didn’t change me as a person... it didn’t fix anything in my life… Defining yourself by those accomplishments will destroy you ultimately.”

Phelps called it the weight of gold. And at it’s heart, it’s what Homer’s epic is all about. It’s right there in the poem. Odysseus returns to Ithaca about halfway through it. The entire second half is about what happens when he finally reaches his goal. He has to find himself, and his place again.

Getting home and being home are different problems. Which is exactly the retired athlete’s discovery: the plane lands, the medal’s on the shelf, and the harder half hasn’t started.

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What is toughness? What’s it mean to endure, to be resilient? Homer gives us an answer in the first line of the poem, andra polytropon. Which translates to “the man of many turns.”

Living life, pursuing goals, performing is messy. Odysseus himself is a flawed human being. But that line gets at what is at the heart of performing in just about anything: flexibility and adaptability. It’s what all great competitors possess. The challenges that you face are vast and varied. And no solution or tactic works all the time. It’s flexibility, having a big toolbox of coping strategies, which separates those who can figure things out versus those who get stuck.

-Steve

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game