Edition 38 | 09 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 picks up on something I admitted on LinkedIn: that the work that looks easiest from the outside is often the most expensive on the inside.

The Cost of Being Good At Something

Most people who know me through work would describe me as sociable. I do the events. The panels, the early coffees, the long days of meetings and introductions. I show up, and I'm good at it.

What they don't see is what happens afterwards.

When I get home, I disappear. Comfortable clothes, junk food: whatever's easy and slightly bad for me. A show I've already seen, sometimes more than once. Phone on Instagram with the TV running. No work email. No more conversations.

After my book launch in February, an event I'd genuinely loved, I was wiped out for two days afterwards. The day itself was wonderful. The recovery wasn't optional.

For a long time, I read this as a failing. Some private gap between the version of me that performed well in public and a quieter, more depleted version that came home. I thought needing the evening to recover meant I wasn't really suited to the public-facing parts of the work, and so I'd push through, pretend the energy was endless, and pay for it the next day or the next week.

What I've come to see is that I was confusing two things.

Being good at something and being energised by it are not the same. I'm good at networking. It doesn't refill me. It depletes me. And the smartest thing I can do is plan the recovery as deliberately as I plan the event itself.

This isn't unique to me, and it isn't really about networking. It's about how we account for the cost of activities we're good at. We tend to assume that competence implies enjoyment, and enjoyment implies energy gained. None of that is automatically true. Some of the things we're best at deplete us the most, precisely because we make them look effortless. The people around us don't see the cost, and slowly we stop seeing it either.

This is one of the more expensive sentences any of us uses on ourselves: I'm fine. It was a good day. It can be true, and still leave you with three days of fatigue you haven't planned for.

I don't think the answer is doing less of what we're good at. It's noticing the cost honestly, and building the recovery into the plan rather than treating it as failure.

It isn't a virtue. It isn't a productivity hack. It's just honest accounting.

The parts of our work that look easy from the outside are often the most expensive on the inside. Planning for the cost is part of doing the work well.

👉 I shared the 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 3: Buy, Don't Build

By the late 1970s, Whitey Basson had a clear idea of what South African retail needed: convenience stores, focused, smaller, with a tighter range than the general dealers of the time. He could have started building them from scratch., but he chose not to.

It would be better and faster, he reasoned, to buy something that already existed. As luck would have it, a small chain of eight stores in and around Cape Town was for sale. They were called Shoprite. He bought them, and built his empire on someone else's foundations.

The instinct mattered more than the deal. A builder's first question is how do I make this? An operator's first question is who has already made this, and can I make it better? Basson asked the second question for the rest of his career.

The Lesson:

Ambition isn't always about creating something from nothing. Sometimes the fastest route to scale is recognising what someone else has already built, and having the discipline to run it better than they did.

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On My Desk

Met with Nokuhle Kumalo on Friday, author of Boss Your Money, for the kind of conversation two writers in different lanes sometimes get to have. Both CAs, working in the same publishing space at very different ends of the scale: her book is a no-fluff guide to building personal wealth in South Africa; mine is about how we manage the country's finances. Same currency, different altitude.

We weren't comparing books. We were comparing the business of being an author after the launch: distribution, bulk orders for organisations, how speaking and conferences plug into all of it. The unsexy parts of authorship that don't appear in the writing process and that no one really teaches you.

Useful in a way I'd underestimated. Some things you can read about; others only land when someone who's a few steps ahead, or in a different lane entirely, talks you through what worked for them.

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Closing Perspective Most of what costs us isn't on any visible ledger. Energy, attention, recovery, the slow erosion or restoration that follows everything we do: none of it shows up where we usually look. The discipline isn't more output. It's better accounting. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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