Edition 56 | 13 October 2026

Welcome to The Perspective, a weekly note on work, leadership, and clarity. The aim isn't to add another voice to the noise. It's to slow down for a moment, look at something carefully, and see what's actually underneath. Some editions land practical, some more reflective. All chosen to help you see the pattern behind the noise.

This week’s note is drawn from a LinkedIn post last week, about something I rewatched, and what the exercise of finding it told me about how we watch anything now.

Choosing Is the New Watching

I found all of the Mr. Bean episodes on YouTube last week. Back to back, they run a little under six hours. That is about three movies.

For anyone who grew up with it, that does not match the memory. It feels like it ran for years, and in a way it did. Fourteen episodes released in bursts across almost six years, from January 1990 to November 1995, with gaps of up to eleven months between them.

Two things, I think, made it feel bigger than it was. Each episode held two or three separate sketches, so what stayed were the scenes, not the episodes. One sketch, a commercial break, then another, and he hardly spoke, so each scene stayed as a picture that could be replayed without words getting in the way.

The spacing mattered too. When I binge a series over a week, it feels like one thing. Mr. Bean seemed to be on every week, so it felt like there was far more of it.

I would be careful about turning that into a nostalgic argument about quality. There was plenty of poor television in the nineties, and most of it we do not remember. Survivorship bias is doing some of the work in any claim that things were better then.

But the exercise of finding Mr. Bean on YouTube told me something I had not quite seen before.

These days I can spend twenty minutes looking for something to watch, give up, and end up on my phone. The problem is not that there is nothing on. The problem is the opposite. There is too much available, and the energy that used to go into watching now goes into choosing.

Choosing is tiring in a way watching is not. Watching lets a story carry you. Choosing requires you to carry everything, every option, every review score, every half-remembered recommendation, every “I meant to get around to this.” By the time you have chosen, part of what you were trying to protect, the quiet attention that would have made the watching good, has already been spent.

This is not really about television. It is about what happens to any experience when the catalogue becomes infinite.

A Spotify library of forty million songs produces fewer listens of any single song than a shelf of three CDs did. Not because the three CDs were better, but because the three CDs removed the question of what to play. A Kindle with four hundred books on it produces fewer completed reads than a bedside table with two. A newsletter inbox that has fifteen senders competing for attention produces fewer deep reads than the one Financial Mail that used to arrive on a Friday morning.

The constraint was doing more work than we realised. It was not making the content better. It was removing the cost of selection, and leaving the attention intact for the thing itself.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for anyone producing content now, including me. The reader is not short of things to read. They are short of the attention that reading requires. Every new option added to the catalogue takes a small amount from the attention available to any single one, including the new one.

Would Mr. Bean survive today? I do not know. The content would still be good. But the fourteen episodes would be sitting on a shelf with ten thousand other options, and the attention that found them in 1990 would be busy choosing between them.

The scarcity was never what made the watching work. The absence of the choice was.

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

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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The Longer Read

We Built the Distance Twice

I published a piece this week on the cost of transport in South Africa. The visible cost is easy to work out: about 17% of take-home pay goes to fares and fuel. The less visible part is the time. Harvard’s Growth Lab values the hours in transit at what each worker’s hour is worth at work, which pulls the full cost closer to 57% of what the job pays. Someone travelling three hours a day and working eight has put in eleven hours for eight hours of pay.

The piece works through why those distances exist. Under the Group Areas Act, people were removed from the parts of cities where the work was and resettled on the far edges. Since 1994, the state has built roughly two million houses, overwhelmingly on cheap land, which also sits on the edges.

The first was ideological. The second was budgetary. The geography is the same.

Read the piece

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On My Desk

Both Indabas at the Sandton Convention Centre next week. The HR Indaba on Tuesday, and the Finance Indaba on Thursday. Which means this week is the quiet one that nobody sees. Finalising the stand, confirming the build, checking that each decision taken over the last six months still holds up now that the week itself is in sight.

The planning began in April. A specific hook for the stand, built from scratch, requiring a small team working on different pieces at different times. Nothing about it has been visible from outside, and most of it will not be visible on the day either. A visitor walks up, interacts with the stand for a few minutes, and walks away. The six months behind that few minutes do not announce themselves.

A conference stand that works is one nobody notices the mechanics of. The week before the event is almost always busier than the event itself. The event is the visible day. The visible day runs on everything that was decided and prepared in the weeks and months nobody is watching, by the people whose names are not on the stand.

By Tuesday morning, when the HR Indaba opens, the preparation will be invisible. Which is the point.

Closing Perspective The scarcity that used to protect our attention was never a feature of the content. It was a feature of the shelf. The shelf is now infinite, and the attention is not. Which means the real work, for anyone trying to be read or heard now, is not making more. It is making something worth the choosing. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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