#33: Classics — How Studying Ancient Civilizations Still Impacts my Career
Warning: this is a longer one. I’m on a cross-country flight, reading a book about Classics and relishing in how awesome of a week I just had with my teams, and decided to do a free write. For new subscribers, Exonomsit is written in raw form. I almost never go back and proof-read or edit, so expect typos.
“So, Classics? What’s that all about?”
I can’t count the number of times someone asked me this during an interview. For many years (before I had an independent professional track record established) this was usually one of the first questions I received from interviewers. Didn’t matter if it was economic development, consulting, investment banking, advertising, or robotics (all industries I targeted out of undergrad), Classics was always the thing that got people curious. My own curiosity for Classics goes back to early high school.
The Path to Classics:
So how did I get to Classics? It started off In my mid-teenage years, when I was an absolutely awful student, if you judged by my grade reports. The exact numbers evade me all these years later, but my GPA was something like a 2.3 or 2.4 going into my Sophomore year of high school. Not great. I was always interested in what I was learning, but just not interested enough. A series of things happened in my sophomore year that pushed me to turn my academic life around, but studying Classics was really the major turning point for me intellectually.
I was fortunate enough to move to a school that actually offered Greek and Latin classes when I was a Sophomore. It was a massive culture shock for me, but my Classics courses were one of the first (read: only) places where I felt like I was on equal footing with my classmates. My math skills were fine, but not great at the time; my history knowledge was meh; my grammar was fine (don’t criticize my use of semi-colons, dude — I’m free writing right now). Everyone around me seemed to have been taking advanced/honors courses since they were in the womb. In every class, I felt completely, utterly outgunned, but in Classics, there was no structural advantage: it was brand new to all of us, and therefore I could use it as a “test” to see what I was capable of.
I think it was the mix of history and learning an entirely new system of thought that enthralled me. You see, to be able to write in Koine (ancient) greek (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek) or Latin, you have to understand context…nuance. You need to appreciate the time in which something was written…The history of how grammatical structures evolved over the ages. It wasn’t just rote memorization that would get you the A+… You had to understand the ecosystem…the “matrix” that surrounded a single.word. It was utterly ridiculous to have to think at this level to understand that the word “aletheia” (it means Truth) could mean many different things depending on the words around it, and the era in which the words were written. Holy shit that’s cool! (can you see why I chose to major in Classics?).
Dialing up my Focus on Classics (with a heavy side of Economics)
Fast forward to my senior year and I’ve had two years of Greek and Latin under my belt. It’s 2008 and the economy is falling apart; our burgeoning family business is going through its second existential crisis/threat, and I’m trying to make sense of the fact that now all of a sudden we’re once again hyper concerned about our economic wellbeing (the prior year was one of the first times likely in our multi-century family history that we felt economic comfort). Probably out of a sense of desperation I tried to understand why our economic wellbeing was being so threatened. Interest rates, what? Money supply? Consumer sentiment? Stress tests for banks? Supply and demand? I wanted to understand why — out of nowhere — my family was hyper concerned about our ability to pay our bills or avoid diving into a credit card interest spiral. Why?
During that time, many pundits on the hyper-balanced news networks (….) would talk about crisis, and how so many things signaled the “beginning of the end” and I started reading up on why Rome fell, only to discover that economics played a large role in determining the outcomes of a civilization — a collection of city-states. So, while I am studying ancient Greek and Latin, I’m also studying modern and historical Economics, and the world suddenly started to make more sense. It was the first time I felt a sense of enlightenment / illumination about how the world’s civilizations interacted, and I was addicted to the intellectual jazz of these two topics. If I could understand how ancient civilizations rose and fell, and also understand how ****money — an underlying aspect of all modern society — played a role in our daily lives, well then maybe I could make a positive difference in the world and/or help modern organizations move in a way that overcame so many of the mistakes that one can discern and avoid from studying history and appreciating CONTEXT and NUANCE.
Shift forward to 2009 and I’m entering my Freshman year of college. My stated (deliberate) mission at Bucknell was to, “understand how civilizations rise and fall, and ideally uncover ways that we can delay or altogether avoid our own fall as an American civilization.” I continued taking a super wild mix of courses — Roman Civilization, Macro and Microeconomics, American Poetry, Computing Systems & Architecture. At this point, I’m starting to learn about how ancient people lived their lives, how our economy works, how words can be so powerful, and how technology can propel humanity forward (or endanger it). So, imagine doing this for four years, and all of a sudden you have a really odd/special/awesome mix of things.
Six Ways Classics (and Economics) Impact my Career Today:
So let’s fast forward to today, 2022. This foundation of Classics and Economics (and other topics) influences how I show up every day to work. And I believe the combination has played a really key role in the relatively fast career progression I’ve had. At this point, I’m going to switch back to more typical Exonomist-style writing and drop some bullet points.
Context & Nuance: Classics, as I’ve alluded to above, is all about Context and Nuance. Imagine, for a moment, obsessing over the context around a situation you have at work, and the details that influence what you’re currently experiencing?
Think about the last time you disagreed with someone on an approach to take. Did you deeply listen to the words a person chose to use? To the cadence of their voice? To the time of day/year it was said? To the tone? To the hesitation? To the duration of their words? All of these dimensions come together to signal Something about the person and what they care about and how they feel. If you can appreciate this, you will be able to navigate work / collaboration more effectively
Deep Study of a Topic (and the many interpretations / opinions around a topic) will help you better understand what is optimal or correct
In Classics, you’re exposed to many different “translations” of the very same text. And mind you: these translations are into many different languages. You ask one scholar what the opening line of the Aeneid ****or the Iliad means, and their opinion is likely to differ from others, even if only slightly.
In the business world, **this has helped me to never over-index on one point of view…**To remember that there is usually no “right” answer, and instead many different approaches to take… and by asking questions, listening, and having healthy debate you and those around you might find some new path forward together
Language Choices: In the Classics, the very same word can mean different things in different contexts. It teaches you to not assume that you understand something at face value, but that there might be a deeper story — a deeper Why — to a word or to an action.
If you view the world this way, you start to track cause + effect relationships more, and to embrace the curiosity of how the “same” cause can have very different effects / outcomes
Example: “I want to leverage your skillset” vs. “I want to leverage you” vs. “Can we find a way to partner together?”
Meditate on these three phrases. They can very easily mean different things depending on context, tone, and existing relationship dynamics, but even without all of that the word choices communicate different mindsets. “Leveraging” someone can be super transactional and impersonal, not to mention dehumanizing; “partnering” with someone has a far more egalitarian, collaborative tone.
Think I’m overthinking this? Wait until you have and/or reflect on a time when you presented to or wrote a communication for thousands of people…All of sudden you’ll appreciate how a single word can be interpreted a thousand different ways
The best communicators appreciate how choiceful you need to be with words, especially when communicating something complex or emotionally charged — this applies both to work in a for-profit company and especially in a public service context
The Era Within Which You Live and Work Matters, and this isn’t just the temporal era — the 90s the 2010s, etc. — it’s also the era of leadership and the associated culture you experience. At work this can mean the leader you work for, or the industry dynamics that impact how your organization achieves or fails to achieve your target outcomes
When I was working for Deloitte’s CEO, she ushered in an era defined by the power of vulnerability, career intentionality, diverse experiences, and intellectual safety. This context allowed people to speak more candidly, to pursue career opportunities with a decreased fear of retribution from managers who didn’t want to let “resources” go, etc. (not saying these things disappeared…)
If you pay attention closely to how your leadership communicates — the words they utilize, the tone of communication — you can learn much about how to make an impact
I once had a client who’s motto was, “Always be on Offense”
This communicated a form of aggression, or high-tempo behavior… of prioritizing winning
I had another client who’s ethos was all about “Purpose and joy at work” — sure, they were still focus on winning economically, but their first priority was the culture of the organization
How you would communicate to these two leaders would be different. I probably wouldn’t have made an impassioned speech about purpose, culture, belonging, etc. to the CXO who was hyper concerned with “being on offense” “taking marketshare from competitors” and “being brutally efficient”
…But nuance tells you that these two leaders could have some degree of overlap, adn the “Purpose and Joy” and “Being on Offense” can potentially co-exist, but you need to consider the timing of your message, and the tone of it as well
Genuine curiosity and almost “unreasonably deep” study of a topic can reveal neat aspects of the world around you
Example: I was recently catching up with a founder who I angel invested into about a year ago and we were talking about what would compel someone to switch from a product they’ve been using for years to a new one (the founder’s). We talked about having a strong value proposition, and pricing the product appropriately, and making sure that “the core market for the product knew that we existed” …but then there’s also the exact words, and the order of the words, and the tone, and the colors, and the placement of the words that matter. We literally spent 30 minutes diving deep into this single topic, evaluating all of the different ways a single word or term could come across to different buyers, which ultimately led the founder to invest some more time researching a slightly new segment of the market (..and I tell this story because that new market we talked about has been a key to a new phase of growth! They’ve honed their messaging and the channels that they put marketing investment into, and they’ve gotten a higher ROMI (return on marketing investment) from this new segment
Economics is largely about incentives, decisions, scarcity dynamics, demand, and size and vitality (speed?) of markets for goods and services. There’s much more to it, but these are some pretty foundational aspects of the field. In the business world, economics underpins everything…. And it’s not whether or not you have a good product that matters, it’s whether enough people care about it enough to pay for it, ideally over and over again, despite decreasing scarcity to whatever you’re offering (read: competition).
Most ancient civilizations grew into positions of dominance because they had some product or set of products (precious metals, diamonds, foods, technologies) that other civilizations (read: organizations) were willing to pay for, over and over again. This is how we these civilizations funded the projects and expeditions that would shape their world and the world they traded with
This even shows up today in modern markets. Co-opetition is an example — a case where one company both competes and transacts with another company.
Example: Microsoft has Teams, Facebook has Facebook At Work, but they also have an exclusive partnership around virtual reality
It also shows up in global politics — China buys many products from the US, the US buys many products from China, people travel back and forth between these two countries, and yet they’re currently competing for power on the global stage. Their economic positioning influences the values their respective cultures elevate and de-emphasize, and this extends to the day-to-day interactions citizens from these two worlds have with each other… And you have to appreciate this context when doing business, or — more specifically — making business decisions.
Closing Thoughts
I graduated from Bucknell nearly ten years ago, and yet I still think about many of the above topics every day. They make life more rich, more interesting, and an appreciation for all that I learned through studies both before, during, and after college + what I have learned by just living life in the post-college world actively improves my ability to show up and make an impact in life…Whether it’s noticing that someone is having a shitty day and needs some grace, or appreciating that the competitive dynamics in B2B SaaS are shifting ever-so-slightly, and small shifts open up opportunities (that companies like my old startup could take advantage of!).
Have an awesome weekend everyone. If you made it to this sentence, I am shocked.
Michael