The Current | July 16–31, 2026: The Odyssey Has Endured for 3,000 Years. Your Last LinkedIn Post Was Forgotten Instantly.
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This issue: a 3,000-year-old story survived on nothing but being worth repeating. Here’s why most business content doesn’t survive the week.
The Current | July 16-31, 2026 — Kwedar & Co.
The lead
The Odyssey has endured for 3,000 years. Your last LinkedIn post was forgotten instantly.
The Odyssey opens in theaters this week. As moviegoers watch Matt Damon on screen, I’d wager that most audience members don’t realize this story is thousands of years old. And, in fact, for centuries it existed only one way: memorized, performed, and passed from one storyteller to the next, around campfires, across generations, before a single word of it was ever written down.
Think about that a moment. This is a story so specific and so human that it survived for centuries without paper, without a content strategy, without your favorite AI, purely because people found it worth repeating.
Now think about the last thing your company published. Where is it? Who repeated it? Did it survive the week?
These days, most business communication has two problems: it’s flat, meaning it has no texture, no point of view, nothing that makes someone stop and think “wait, who said that?” And it’s slippery, meaning nothing sticks. It washes over people and they move on. No memory, no repeating, and no action.
The Odyssey endured because it was impossible to forget. Most corporate content is forgotten before the scroll stops.
So what would happen if your company had a story that good? Don’t worry; it doesn’t have to be The Odyssey good. Nobody’s asking you to write an epic poem. But a story that is clear, specific, and human enough that a client repeats it to a colleague without being prompted.
A story good enough that it works hard without you even being in the room to share it.
What we’re seeing
The companies producing the flattest, most forgettable content are often the ones with the most interesting stories to tell. They’re not boring, and they’re not intentionally hiding what makes them fascinating. They just can’t see what makes them distinct, because they’re standing too close to it.
You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.
When you’ve spent years doing the work, the things that make you genuinely different start to feel obvious, even mundane. The process you obsess over, the origin story, the specific way you solve a problem nobody else approaches quite that way. To you, it’s just Tuesday. So, you leave it out. You reach for the safe, professional language that every company in your category uses, because it feels appropriately serious, and you assume the interesting parts are too niche or too ordinary (or too vulnerable) to matter.
They’re exactly what matters. The detail you’re tempted to cut is usually the one a client would repeat to a colleague. The story you think is too small is the one that makes you memorable. The specificity you’re sanding off to sound more polished is the texture that would have made you impossible to forget.
And here’s what makes it worse: nobody has time to notice. We have more tools at our fingertips than any business in history: content generators, scheduling platforms, AI assistants that draft a blog post in the time it takes to snap your fingers. By every reasonable measure, the work should be easier now. And yet almost everyone reports the same thing: they’re working harder than ever.
The tools didn’t reduce the workload; they raised the expected output. When you can produce ten times as much, the assumption quickly becomes that you should. So the LinkedIn post that used to go out once a week now goes out daily. The blog that was quarterly is now weekly. The volume climbs, the calendar fills, and the faster content gets produced, the less thought goes into each piece. Companies are speaking more often than ever while saying less than ever.
Flat and slippery isn’t a failure of effort; it’s a failure of proximity. And the fix usually requires someone outside the bottle to read the label back to you.
The cautionary tale
Once upon a time, we worked with a company that had everything going for it. A smart team, real expertise, a genuinely interesting origin story sitting right there in their history.
So we started where you’re supposed to start, with the founders. Why do you do this work?
“To make money.”
Fair enough. But there’s usually something underneath that, so we pushed. What draws you to this? Who do you serve best? What do your best clients say about you that your competitors could never claim?
They had an answer for that, too: “go look at what our competitors are doing.”
They weren’t being difficult; they were terrified. Every specific thing they could have said felt like a door closing on some hypothetical prospect who might have wanted something else. Naming who they were best for meant admitting who they weren’t for, and that math never looked good to them.
They had stories worth telling. They just couldn’t bring themselves to tell them. And in trying to stay open to everyone, they became nothing to no one.
One thing worth your time
For the next day or two, pay attention to your own scrolling. Notice what actually stops you: the post you read all the way through, the line you screenshot, the thing you send to a colleague with “this is so us.” Then notice what you scroll past without a second thought.
The stuff you remember is almost always fresh, human, and real. It sounds like a person with an actual point of view. The stuff you skip is usually reaching toward meaning without ever getting there. Professional, polished, and completely forgettable. About as flat and slippery as it gets.
Now here’s the real question. Which pile does your company’s content land in? Be honest. You already know what good looks like, because you stop for it every day. So: does your story stop your scroll — and could you repeat it tomorrow?
If it doesn’t, find the thing you cut for being too specific. Put it back.
About The Author
Lauren Kwedar Cockerell is founder and president of Kwedar & Co, a Fort Worth-based PR, messaging, and strategic communications firm serving purpose-driven B2B companies. She is also the firm’s lead PR and marketing strategist, host of our podcast The Impatient Entrepreneur, as well as a frequent podcast guest.
Over the past 20+ years, she has worked with 100s of leaders and organizations to create PR and marketing strategies and tactics that support visions and reach goals.
To connect with Lauren, please send an email above, or book a consultation.