The Odyssey - A Song for the Ages

As an executive coach, I have had the pleasure, privilege and challenge of advising talented business executives on diverse efforts to create great products, services and value for clients and great wealth for investors and employees.

Although most of these executives have achieved significant professional success, many of them have struggled to align and integrate their career achievements with their expectations for a healthy and fulfilling life beyond the workplace.

Like the classical hero, Odysseus, these leaders typically are praised, respected and rewarded for their genius, guile, skill and courage in battle.

Like Odysseus, these leaders also struggle at times to reconcile their zest for professional challenge, competition, travel and adventure with their yearning for the joys and comforts of home.

For executives interested in fighting bigger business battles and winning even greater professional glory and rewards, the story of the Trojan war itself as told by Homer in the Iliad, is a very compelling and instructional tale.

But for most Greek heroes, the struggle to return home safely after victory in battle was a far greater challenge than winning the war itself.

Although some fortunate victors returned home from Troy swiftly and without incident, others like Agamemnon were murdered at their doorstep by a cheating wife and her ambitious lover.

And still others, like Odysseus, were destined to wander, “blown off course time and again” … “suffering deep in his heart at sea/as he struggled to survive and bring his men home.”

If I could read only one book for the rest of my life, I would choose the Odyssey, Homer’s epic account of Odysseus’ homecoming.

Brilliant and beautiful, it is a song for the ages, a story that resonates for those seeking to enjoy, explore and reflect on their own life’s journey.

“Speak, Memory –

Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.

Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried –
The fools – destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.

Of these things,
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.”

- Odyssey, 1: 1-12 (translation by Stanley Lombardo)

If you'd like to join our on-line reading group, please see: http://groups.google.com/group/irislearning

To purchase your copy of Stanley Lombardo's translation of the Odyssey, please see: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0872204847/irislearninleade