Edition 36 | 26 May 2026

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

This week's note builds from something small I noticed while watching an event I had no real interest in, and what it revealed about how our attention gets bought. Some ideas benefit from sitting with them a little longer before the line gets drawn.

When the Build-Up Becomes the Product

I don't follow MMA. But Ronda Rousey's comeback fight kept showing up in my feed, wrapped in enough hype that I eventually sat down to watch it. Pure FOMO. Everyone seemed to be talking about it, and I didn't want to be the one who'd missed it.

It was over in 17 seconds. One takedown, one armbar, done.

I sat there almost laughing at myself. I don't care about the sport. I'd just handed over an evening to a wave of hype for something that lasted less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee.

But the part worth sitting with isn't the anticlimax. It's what actually got me invested in the first place.

It wasn't the fight. It was the build-up. The storyline, the years away, the comeback, the behind-the-scenes footage. All of it brilliantly produced. By the time the two of them stepped into the cage, I was genuinely invested in an event I had no prior interest in. And then the event itself, the thing all of it was supposedly building towards, was over before it began.

The more I think about it, the more I notice the same pattern everywhere.

The trailer outshines the film. The teaser beats the launch. The pre-order campaign generates more energy than the product it's selling. In each case the build-up isn't the marketing for the thing. The build-up is the thing. It's where the time, the budget, and the craft actually go, because it's where the value gets extracted.

And it works, commercially, even when the event disappoints. A 17-second anticlimax can still be a triumph, because by the time the anticlimax arrives, the transaction is already complete. The attention has been captured, the subscription justified, the conversation joined. Whether the event delivers is almost beside the point. The value was taken upstream.

That's the part worth being honest about. We tend to think we're paying for the thing: the fight, the film, the product, the launch. Increasingly, we're paying for the anticipation of it. And anticipation is a strange thing to buy, because it feels identical to genuine interest in the moment, and completely different in hindsight.

It leaves a simple test, the kind that's easy to state and harder to apply. Before committing time or attention to something, it's worth asking whether you're actually interested in the thing, or just caught in the build-up around it.

The two feel the same when the noise is loudest. They feel very different seventeen seconds later.

👉 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 1: Price is a Promise

Whitey Basson's first lesson in retail came with a marking gun in his hand. Walking the stores with Shoprite's founder, Barney Rogut, he found a display of unmarked tins and asked what to do. Barney handed him a gun and said: the customers are arriving soon, and everything has to be right.

Another day, Barney caught an auditor counting packets of chewing gum. Just take a calculated guess, he told him, by the time you've finished counting, there's no more profit in it.

Both moments taught the same thing. Every cent mattered, because every cent saved could be passed to the customer. For the shopper living on R100 a week, price isn't a preference: it's the whole decision.

That belief became the foundation Basson built an empire on: always be cheaper, because someone is counting.

The Lesson:

The lowest price isn't a marketing tactic. It's a promise, to the person for whom every cent decides what goes in the basket, and what gets left behind.

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On My Desk

Three weeks into the practice, and the shape of the week is entirely my own to set.

The variety itself isn't new. Most of my career has moved between sites, offices, meetings, and travel: few of my weeks ever had a single fixed cadence. What's different now is that there's no organisation behind it. No structure I'm slotting into, no frame someone else has already built.

A meeting one morning, focused work the next afternoon, a couple of days out, a few calls from home. And Eid in the middle of it. The pieces are familiar.

What's changed is that holding them together is now entirely mine to do.

So far, I'm enjoying it more than I expected. Running an errand in the middle of the day, sitting in a restaurant on a weekday afternoon, going to the mall when it's quiet: none of it feels like time stolen from somewhere else. The work still gets done. It just no longer comes with the quiet sense of being on someone's clock.

Closing Perspective The noise around a thing is not the thing. And the louder the noise, the more it's worth asking what it's standing in front of. Sometimes there's substance behind it. Sometimes there's seventeen seconds. Either way, the noise was never the point. It only felt like it was. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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