Sargon The Great
On the perils of locally maximizing
Records of our Age of Empires begin around 2250 BC. The first empire that we have definitive records about is the Akhadian Empire of Sargon the Great.
A few years before Sargon became Great, he was just a mini-baller/SEO bro and a local tough guy — his day job was being the King of Kish, a small Sumerian city-state about 12k east of Babylon. After a few decades of grinding he managed to conquer not only all of the other Mesopotamian city-states, but also some territory outside the Mesopotamian heartland.
Sargon boasted that he had conquered the entire world.
In reality, he had managed to subdue a chunk of land from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.
The Akkadian Empire was not Built To Last, and did not last long after Sargon’s death. His legacy remained, however. Over the next 1,700 years a host of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite kings scrabbled and fought and died for this spit of land. They adopted Sargon and his imperial mantle as a role model, boasting that they, too, had conquered the entire world.
Sargon the Great made up what the whole world was, and for more than a millennia a bunch of hard-case characters fought to rule that little world, playing the Glass Bead Game that Sargon invented.
Then, around 500 BC Cyrus — also called Great — showed up, smacked everyone in the region down, and sucked up that pile of sand, dirt, and water into his own — much larger — Empire (with a capital E).
We can get so into the game we are playing with the players we are playing with that we can forget the whole picture.
If our fastest friends run a six-minute mile, then that’s fast. If you can play jiu-jitsu better than the other jiu-jitsu players you play with, then you are a good player of jiu-jitsu. The revenue, growth rates, and other real-world or vanity performance metrics other startups have or publish or lie about are not a suitable yardstick to compare your own thing with.
When you sell your company for a “big exit” locally and think you “made it” without considering what’s happening outside of your little tide pool, you are locally maximizing. When what others are doing — what is good enough “around here” — becomes your good enough, you are locally maximizing.
Here’s the truth. Most of the time you are so far from the standard you have no idea what the standard is. This truth is almost universal. You have to intentionally go out and play in traffic to discover the gulf between self-image and actual capacity, and most people lack the will or the stomach to do that. Becoming Charlie Parker meant getting into the Kansas City jazz crucible and barely coming out alive the first go-round. The experience of getting shot out the back by the benchmark performance level sent him to the Ozarks for more than a year to hone his technique before returning.
Not into that? Best stay in your cube and keep your head down.
Pour one out for Sargon The Great. The mini-baller who conquered Provo to Salt Lake City and called it the whole world.
