Edition 37 | 02 June 2026

Welcome to The Perspective. Each week, a few reflections on work, leadership, and clarity. Not to add to the noise, but to slow things down just enough to think properly. Some practical, some more reflective, all chosen with the same intent: to navigate complexity with a steadier hand.

This week's note starts with a small confession, and ends somewhere I didn't expect.

Almost Forty, and Finally Reading

A confession: for most of my adult life, I didn't read books. I'm almost 40.

I started writing my own book early last year, and around the middle of the year a friend gave me a few books as a gift. One of them was The Alchemist. A novel, of all things, for someone who was certain he didn't have the patience for fiction.

I loved it. And that gift is what started it.

From there I found my lane: the stories of people who built things. Phil Knight. Indra Nooyi. Sol Kerzner. The Whitey Basson biography. Right now, two South African business stories from opposite ends of the spectrum, sitting on the same side table.

But the reading isn't really what I've been thinking about. It's the label.

For nearly two decades I told myself, and anyone who asked, that I wasn't a reader. I said it the way you state your height: not a complaint, not a failed goal, just a settled fact about who I was. I don't read. And it turned out to be completely untrue. One gift and one deadline overturned something I'd believed for twenty years. The label had never been a fact at all. It was an assumption I'd stopped questioning so long ago I'd forgotten it was ever a question.

That's the part worth sitting with. If that one was wrong, how many others am I still carrying?

We do this constantly. I'm not a numbers person. I'm not creative. I'm not fit. I'm not the kind of person who speaks up, or starts things. We state them as truths about our nature, when most are just descriptions of a moment that hardened into something permanent. The danger isn't that they're false. It's that they're quiet. They don't announce themselves as limits. They close doors so softly we never hear them shut.

The labels we hold longest are the ones we test least. We don't revisit them, because they don't feel like beliefs. They feel like facts. And you don't argue with a fact.

The lesson isn't to distrust everything you know about yourself. It's narrower: to notice when "I'm not the kind of person who…" is doing more work than it has earned, and to wonder what would happen if you simply tested it.

Sometimes a whole part of your life sits behind a door you decided, years ago and without much thought, was locked.​

👉 I shared a shorter version of this on LinkedIn last week:

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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Lessons from a Business Mastermind

Series Four: Whitey Basson

Episode 2: Everything in Its Place

When Basson took over Shoprite, the stores didn't match. Some had carpet instead of tiles: push a trolley across it and a bubble of fabric rolled ahead of you. Some were more clothing shop than grocer. They looked like a collection of different businesses wearing the same name.

So he standardised everything. The colour of the wall tiles, the size of the shelves, where each department sat, the layout a customer walked through. When the butchery tiles came back white, he rejected them, too much like a hospital, and added colour. Nothing was too small to specify.

This wasn't fussiness. A customer who finds the same store, laid out the same way, in every town learns to trust it without thinking. Consistency is what turns a shop into a brand.

The Lesson:

Scale doesn't come from doing big things once. It comes from doing small things the same way, everywhere, every time, until the standard itself becomes the product.

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On My Desk

A lot of conference planning happening in the background.

Speaking at the Africa Insurance Exchange in Sun City in July, and Pragmatic Thinking will have a stand at the Finance Indaba and HR Indaba in October.

I've spoken at conferences for years, but always as part of a company, and always, if I'm honest, planned at the last minute. Doing it for myself changes that. There's no one else's machinery to fall back on. The planning is mine now, and it has to happen early.

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Closing Perspective Some of the most fixed things about us were never decided on purpose. They settled quietly, went unquestioned, and hardened into fact. Worth asking, now and then, which of them would survive being tested. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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