Be careful when you dare to learn the history of something you love.  

Histories are complicated things.  Heroes are seldom all good. Villains are seldom all bad.  Finding out the truth forces you to take nuanced positions, which requires you to occupy a blurry middle and makes you annoying at social gatherings. 

So how has LINES OF LEAST RESISTANCE by Riaan Vorster managed to take something as cliched as Table Mountain (Yawn. Yes, Cape Town, we get it, you have a mountain) and tell it’s stories in such a fascinating way that you can’t help being curious? So that you can’t help reading just one more chapter?  So that you can’t help caring?

The answer is love. Love and research.  Or perhaps the love of research.  Vorster has read the thousands of pages of hiker and climber journals, Mountain Club minutes and publications, news articles and whatever else he could find. He has pieced together, scrap by scrap. the story of how Table Mountain got opened up to us.

In 1880 there were only 8 routes up Table Mountain.  By 1950 the Mountain Club of South Africa listed 101 hiking and scrambling routes.  Vorster has dug into the story of every one. And he has climbed all of them.    He has written 101 captivating stories in beautiful prose and condensed them into 3 page chapters for us to nibble on.

The writing is beautiful.  There are coded warnings like the need for “a sense of adventure and a head for heights” (India Venster).  There are evocative descriptions like: “Such is the silence you can almost hear the mountain creak under its own weight.  Out on the crest of the buttress, you ascend from an amphitheatre of wilderness and traverse slopes where centuries pass like shadows” (Orange Grove).  And there is a lot of honesty “The route has always provided more utility than enjoyment and that won’t be changing any time soon” (Victoria Ravine)

We meet the incredible men who opened up the mountain.  Men like Ken Cameron, whose distinctive Cairns can still be found if you know where to look.  These men opened up new lines, good and bad, looking to bag routes like badges, following ancient rules about what constituted a route and then squabbling about the definitions or conveniently forgetting the discoveries of older climbers.

We meet a few sensational women. Climbing up sheer cliffs in puffy dresses.  Sometimes with a rough hemp rope tied round their waists.  No doubt exchanging side eyes at the men’s insistence that they were ‘scrambling’ not rock climbing.

Someone who is feeling inspired should work out the lessons for us and post them as a Linkedin post.  There are no doubt lessons for us.  But that is not what captivated me.  For me, this book made me look at the mountain differently every morning. I scan for routes up, for ravines that might offer a line of lower resistance.  I look at the ridge line.  I ask climbing friends if I will manage this route or that, given I have a plenty of ‘sense of adventure’ but not so much ‘head for heights’.

If you like hiking, running, scrambling or climbing on Table Mountain this book will enrich every step you take on the mountain.  If you don’t live anywhere near Table Mountain, best you avoid this book, lest you become like us insufferable Capetonians who can’t stop talking about our mountain.

Happy reading

How are Governments made?

They say you should never visit a meat processing plant if you like sausages.  Watching the process might just put you off your favourite food.  

I wonder if governments are like that. Normally a government is put together behind party factory walls, where the ruling party balances its interests in hidden negotiations.

But in South Africa’s 2024 election there was no clear majority. The Government needed to be formed between parties, not merely inside the winning party. It needed to be formed through unusual coalitions midwifed in awkward negotiations.

The effect of this was to remove the usual shroud of secrecy. Or at least to move it to venues like the Inanda club where the information could leak out just a little more easily. Journalists close to the fire could listen in.  They could speak to everyone involved. And, as conduits for leaks, they could become participants.

Mandy Wiener’s  “The Deal” is an extraordinary all-access pass into the negotiations that created the Government of National Unity.   It is a wonderful piece of expositional journalism.    Wiener’s close relationships across political lines meant that she was there in the thick of it.  She could observe how the players reacted from the moment the failed majority materialised.  She could document meetings and discussions and body language.  And she could hear it from both sides, exposing the vastly different understandings of what was happening in any one meeting.

She presents the tale without editorial or judgement, allowing us to build our own picture of the players and the game.  She leaves us as the reader to form our own judgement, to form our own favourites and to identify our own villains

And what does the look behind the curtain reveal?

It’s pretty terrifying.  One comes away from this book realising that there was a small group of individuals bumbling in the dark, trying to find a solution to a situation they had never encountered before, carrying enormous baggage, full of misunderstandings of each other, and playing for enormous stakes.  I suddenly realised just how miraculous the outcome was, and how easily it could have been very very different.  

There are some wonderful glimpses of dynamics in the negotiating rooms.   The gentle dance as the parties felt each other out.  The way different parties try to organise themselves.  Some, like the DA, are very formal in terms of process.  Some, like the PA, are very informal but no less strategic.

The ANC comes across as surprisingly self satisfied.  It is delighted at its idea of a GNU, not (gasp) a coalition.  It is riven by internal politics that look at any moment like they might topple Ramaphosa as he tries to navigate away from the EFF and towards the DA knowing that to do so too obviously will put him at grave risk.  It does also appear that the ANC were just better at negotiating, perhaps a skill that they honed in trade union battles.  But the air of gloatiness that infects Ramaphosa’s attitude at the conclusion, his probably correct assumption that he had outnegotiated the DA, made me angry and had me shouting at my book “Stop treating my country like a game!”

It is fascinating to get an insight into the operating culture of the parties.  For all the careful process of the DA, the really interesting dynamic to watch is the structural tension that is created between Tony Leon, Ryan Coetzee and Helen Zille.  There seems to be a quite magical type of intellectual warfare that only those with deep respect for each other can have. The Lord protect a mortal that gets caught in the cross fire. But what a stunning truth finding culture to be able to find a path through robust wrangling. And, oh how dangerous, when it means that you miss the subtleties of your adversaries approach.

It is a remarkable feature of the negotiations just how badly the ANC and the DA were misinterpreting each other.   There seems to be not nearly enough effort to understand the nuances and fundamentally different approaches.  And a rushed negotiation is too late to start this.  There would clearly be great benefit for the major political parties to develop better working models of their foes.   All of the major parties seem blind to the importance of really working hard to understand one’s negotiating partner’s interests (See William Ury’s brilliant “POSSIBLE” for the power of doing this). 

Many of the political parties seemed trapped in adversarial modes, perhaps battle hardened from years of opposing each other, that make it harder to see the opportunities as they arise.  And there is no shortage of prejudice seeping through.  A number of senior politicians seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to refer to Helen Zille as “The Madam”.  This just seems outrageous to me.  So clearly an ad hominem attack to try and diminish an adversary.

The politician that comes off best in this book is Gayton McKenzie.  He has his eyes up. He is clear about what the PA wants, and they have a plan to get it. He is better at reading the changing winds than any of the other players and adjusts his approach quickly and fundamentally.  He then uses humour and shrewdness, to overperform in terms of achieving a good outcome for himself and the PA. The person with the best story wins!

I had underrated the importance of the IFP.  It is their inclusion which mitigates the ‘sell out’ accusation and turns an ANC/ DA coalition into something that can be framed as a GNU where ‘all are welcome’ but some choose not to participate.  If they had not chosen to join, the accusations of the EFF that the GNU was designed so that they would not be able to stomach it, may have attracted more attention.

So how did our GNU players do? On balance I think we got a pretty good outcome.  We were playing a game for which the rules were invented 30 years before in the hope they would never be used. Each player was discovering the game on the field.  And the clock was relentless. We should go back and find the person that thought 14 days were enough!  We need more time!  

So in the end we came off pretty well.  Of course it could have been better. But, man oh man, it could have very easily been way worse.

I have visited meat processing plants, and I still love sausages. And If anything, this book makes me want to be more engaged in politics not less.

Happy reading!

You are spending your money wrong. 

Not objectively. Subjectively. You are not spending your money in a way consistent with your own goals.

Morgan Housel’s new book is a fantastic spur to be more intentional with our spending.  It strikes a wonderfully nuanced note, addressing the errors in both extremes: Wasteful spending in areas that won’t make you happy, and self-defeating addiction to frugality.

The core thought is this. Your priorities and values are different from everyone else’s so think carefully about how you craft your life through your spending.

This book is both deeply theoretical and fundamentally practical.  Housel takes us through the behavioural and psychological drivers behind our spending and saving urges, and lays out tools to chart a better course.  Tools like regret minimisation. What is the likelihood your older self will regret this expenditure.  In my experience this is an incredibly powerful reframing and one that I use for all my big decisions.

Along the way there is plenty of practical wisdom.  I love the warning to avoid the seduction of the inner circle, taken from CS Lewis. The desire to be included in the inner circle is an ancient desire. We want so bad to belong with those we respect.  But this vanity will delude you into spending in ways that promise access but deliver only the futile awareness that there is an even more intimate inner circle.  Happiness by circle pursuit is fundamentally elusive.

Housel is particularly insightful in explaining why spending to grow status is so counter-productive.  It takes a lot of expense to buy a little status, and you are as likely to trigger jealousy as respect.  Just the concept of being clear (and honest with yourself) why you are spending money on any service or product is a great pause.

This book is a warning against behaving like everyone else.  The things that will bring you satisfaction, joy, and enable you to achieve your life goals are, of course, different from what will work for others . So you have to be careful about getting swept up in the social proof of what is good to spend on.

One of the key areas to exercise the art of spending is controlling your total amount of spending. Housel doesn’t see saving as delayed gratification.  Spending on saving is buying independence.  Savings give you independence and protection through life fluctuations.   

And independence isn’t binary.  Housel develops a staircase of independence to help us see where we are at and what we can do to move to more independence.  It’s incredibly helpful to place yourself on the staircase and see what actions you need to take to move up.  

One of the key ways to control spending is to be careful who you socialise with. If you socialise with people with different spending goals, different priorities, and different means, you will find it very difficult to stay off the hedonic treadmill.  And lifestyle is a one way ratchet. It’s very difficult to dial it back 

There is also the warning against becoming trapped in frugality.  My mother used to say “You never regret your indulgences.” But this was against a backdrop of frugality that made these indulgences possible. Living well means focusing your spending on those things that most align with what you value in life and what you want to achieve. 

Spending wisely on saving and investments gives you control.  This is the ultimate luxury: The ability to control your time and having freedom and flexibility to do what you want.   But your savings must be a means. If it becomes the end, then you have also spent foolishly.  The moth and rust still destroy!

How you spend your money is how you live.  Your financial decisions and biases are an illuminating proxy for the other areas where lack of intention is leading you to play other people’s games.  Taking the time to look into this mirror has been incredibly helpful to me in understanding where my spending has drifted with culture rather than reflecting my priorities.  Spending is personal, not logical, so there is no right way to spend your money, but there is an irrational way.  You should spend in a way that is most likely to produce the outcomes you desire.

This is a really excellent book.  It strikes the balance between theoretical and practical, spending and saving.  I think it’s going to be a hit. 

The last word goes to Morgan:

“The most valuable financial asset is not needing to impress anyone.”

Happy reading!

This is my favourite midlife crisis book.

Brooks confronts the topics of our mental decline, how we find contentment, and what it means to live well in the second act of our professional and personal life.  

Brooks categorises our intelligence into Fluid (Young, sharp, fast) intelligence and Crystallized intelligence (wisdom, pattern recognition, judgement). And the sad news is that, once we are in our 40s, our fluid intelligence is in an inevitable decline.

It’s a horrific realisation. But it is a freeing one. Recognising the loss of fluid intelligence gives me the freedom and incentive to build teams full of young energy. Recognising the value of crystallised intelligence helps me to see the value in more seasoned colleagues, and to work on my transition between the two worlds. 

Brooks presents a simple formula for life satisfaction: Satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want. Brooks’ compassionate and vulnerable storytelling helped me to take an honest look at my desires and drives, my haves and my wants, and reconfigure my happiness equation, with an immediate change in my outlook and priorities. How much of what you have would you give up for something you want?  

There is enormous richness and chipping away at your wants.

In Brooks’ view there is a major reorientation that needs to happen: We need to shift from achievement to character. In his metaphor, we go from improving the quality of our resume to improving the quality of our eulogy.  

Throughout the book, Brooks weaves ancient wisdom in with modern psychology. I particularly like his application of Aquinas’s 4 idols. There are 4 substitutes for happiness that will lead us astray: Money, Power, Pleasure and Fame. But understanding which of these are most seductive to us and which are less powerful, we can understand our drives, our likely weaknesses, and give our long term interests the power of our short term desires.

This book gets a huge recommendation from me for anyone in their 40s or 50s. It has really helped to to understand more sharply what I am losing as I age, to value what I have, and to build on what must be there for the second chapter.  

There are other cracking books to read in your midlife. TRIUMPHS OF EXPERIENCE: MEN OF THE HARVARD STUDY by George Valient is an excellent summary of the insights on growing old well from the largest longitudinal study ever conducted. Richard Rohr’s FAILING UPWARD is a more spiritual but equally wise analysis of flourishing in the second half. But this was the one that helped my thinking the most. It is a mix of science, philosophy, wisdom and spirituality and it captured me.

We all have to do the work to shift our perspective from success to significance. But the work will help us live a fruitful and meaningful second half, while avoiding the landmines that our misfiring first halves lay for us in our midlife.  

Don’t be a cliche

Happy reading!

Using data makes you look stupid.

How else do we explain why so many experts in so many fields continue to follow ‘received wisdom’, despite every incentive to be curious and analytical.

How does using data make you look stupid? It’s because there is an asymmetrical trade off. You look a bit cleverer when your counter intuitive decisions work out. But you look like a a fool when you go against received wisdom and you fail. And this will happen.  Even if you are better with data 80% of the time, 1 in 5 times, you will be worse. And when you are worse everyone will delight in the “I told you so!”

So it takes a unique kind of leader to move an organisation from instinctual to analytical.  To move it from self-justifing to enquiring. That’s what Moneyball is all about.

Michael Lewis’s excellent book, Moneyball, tracks the success of Billy Beane and the underfunded Oakland Athletic baseball team as as necessity drives them to think differently. Beane is already a sceptic for the experts in the field having been identified as a ‘sure thing’ by all the scouts. He had the  ‘5 tools’: speed, quickness, arm strength, hitting ability, and mental toughness. It seemed like science. But science without rigour is just weaponised analytics. Beane’s playing career washes out without ever delivering on it’s promise, while many less favoured people he was with go on to make it.  This gives been a natural suspicion for the ‘experts’.

Beanne pairs up with DePodesta, a young economist, and they set about revolutionising the sport of baseball. They fixate on a different stat: On base percentage. How often does a batter get on base (If you can bat 400, you get to first base 40% of the times you go in to bat. If you can do that over your career you are the greatest batter that has ever played)

They find some surprising things. One of the key skills a batter needs to have is the ability to not swing at the first pitch. This risks a strike, but puts huge pressure on the pitcher if it’s a ball. This turns out to be something that some players just do better, but most players can learn.

Yes. It’s the same moneyball as the movie. The one with Brad Pitt. But the level of detail that a book can go in to, means this is even more wonderful than the excellent movie. Lewis’s story telling is deep and broad and always interesting. It meanders into some extraordinary characters in the history of baseball.

This book feels so relevant for the time we are in. We are busy building the most impressive tools we have ever built. Our hope is we will make better decisions. But these tools do not address the reasons we fail to apply intelligence in decision making. How can we shift our thinking to using analysis to find deep truths without falling into the trap of seeking justifying analysis for the opinions we already have.

I wish I was more like Billy Beane. So often I am the other guys. I am one of the foolish guys feeling clever by building compelling narratives supported by data, rather than doing the hard work of seeking out the data to inform my decisions, to change my opinions. Too often I am a press secretary when I should be a scientist. This book is a wonderful challenge.

Michael Lewis is an excellent author. He has a string of books I recommend: The Undoing Project, The Big Short, Liar’s Poker (His first, now with an accompanying podcast).  But Moneyball is his best.

Enjoy!

I don’t listen well enough.

I love rapid fire conversations. Conversations where new thoughts explode off each other. I love conversations where we all interrupt each other, and we popcorn from one thought to another.

So it’s taken me a while to become very aware that this way of being shuts down as much conversation as it creates. Some conversations require time, space, and unhurried attention.

“How to know a person” by David Brooks has been a incredible gift. Brooks’s aim is to help us to see people deeply and make them feel seen. And he believes this is a craft not just an innate ability. We can learn it!

This is an incredibly practical book. It lays out ideas on how to shift how you think about listening. It frames how to be aware of how people are experiencing the world differently.  It challenges us to see attention as a moral act! What a challenge in these days of distraction. Put that phone in your bag, not on the table!

My favourite part of the book is the practical instruction on asking better questions. The best questions invite your conversation partner to tell their story. They involve pauses.  Mirroring. Looping back and rolling forward. The listening makes the story work.

At the heart of this is using authentic vulnerability to unlock connection. The act of self disclosure creates a safe space, which builds the trust that connection needs.

This is a personal book. Brooks opens up about his own journey, talking about the assumptions he realised he was bringing in to conversations and talking about his growth in listening and asking better questions.

By attempting more stillness and patience (not my strong suit!) and asking some better questions, I feel like I have lucked into some enormously interesting conversations that I would have not even realised that I was missing before.

Brooks is challenging us is to be an Illuminator not a diminisher. An Illuminator is characterised by a “persistent curiosity about other people.” That feels like something worth aiming for.  

This is a phenomenal book. Happy reading!

What’s so bad about a teenager being on a phone? Aren’t they just chatting to their friends? Isn’t this just community in the digital age? Whether you are worried or unconcerned about the impact of Smartphones on our teenagers, this is a great book to inform your thinking.

Anxious generation is a brilliant exposition of the impact of smartphones, social media and the reduction in outdoor play on our children. It is practical and nuanced. Haidt tracks the correlations between smartphone childhoods and anxiety and tries to pin down the causations. The correlations are extraordinary but also contested. But the detailed way Haidt explains the impact of a smartphone on a teenager helps us to see the impact on yourself and on your kids.

The difference in the impact on boys and girls is fascinating. For boys, their risk areas are gaming and porn with the result of addiction and withdrawal. But with girls the impact is even more concerning. Teenage girls are most at risk. They can get caught up in the ‘self-esteem crushing vortex’ that social media apps create in their algorithmic pursuit of attention. The result is a wave of mental health issues in our teenage girls that we have never seen before. We need to be better as a community at protecting our children.

The caution around digital protection is well balanced by the challenge to more ‘dangerous’ play in physical spaces.  Our children don’t have enough opportunity for unsupervised free play.  In conjunction with making digital spaces safer we need to release them more in the real world, to make mistakes, to take risks, and to learn.  This is vital to our socialisation. We need to learn how to live in groups without an adult to solve our conflicts.

I love this challenge to my parenting. This feels like a particularly tough challenge when there are so many real dangers for our children. But it has fueled in me the determination to find spaces where my kids can make mistakes, define their own path, and live the consequences, without the risk of tragedy.

I am a conservative dad when it comes to phones and social media. This is not a book my daughters wanted me to read.  But the nuance, data and well worked explanations have meant that the quality of the conversations in my house have gone way up. My kids often talk with frustration of their friends phone use. This book will help you raise the level of discussion you have around phones and social media.

Social media is part of our lives. But we need to be aware of its effects. We need to educate ourselves so that we can help our kids make good decisions. This book is a crucial step in doing exactly that.

The problem with business books is survivorship bias. This book does not have that problem.

The First Kudu is the story of HouseMe, a South African residential letting start-up that nearly could, until it couldn’t. You get a boardroom seat through the wild ride. Those tentative first days. Problems with the Board. The ‘maybe we should have focused more on ops automation’ car-crash. The big strategic decisions: Take the money, dilute the strategy? And we join them for the final funding drama amid the chaos of covid..

Ben and Lorne are students of start-up thinking. It is wonderful to watch them wrestle with how the lessons of Silicon valley apply to their little startup on the Southern tip of Africa.

My heart sank when I discovered that the final section of the book was a ‘lessons learned’ section. These tend to be terrible in most books. Rather just tell me the story and let me learn the lessons. But this was a wonderful surprise. It is Ben and Lorne arguing about what the real lessons were. What a great way to end it.  

It’s a great story, honestly told. You are left rooting for HouseMe to survive even though you know it won’t. Oh for an Angel at the right time!

I feel like I could taste this one. Humanball is the story of Tom’s journey with UCT Rugby. And what a journey. It felt like we were in the camp, at the games, in the dugout.  You feel the victories. You are crushed when the losses come.

This is a fascinating insight into leadership done differently. I am sceptical of easy transfers of sports leadership wisdom to other spheres, but there is something courageous about Tom’s style of leadership. He is so intentional about how he creates themes, culture, how he creates accountability. He is willing to risk looking foolish in order to have a chance at success..

This story is made richer by the fact that it ends with defeat in the final. This isn’t a story of ‘Do everything I did and get guaranteed success’. This is a challenge to me to lead with intentionality and bravery. And effort is a love language.

A well told story can break your heart. 

Khaya is an extraordinary story teller. Many of the stories he tells are of a world I only know in caricatures. Stories of life growing up with his grandparents in rural Transkei. Stories of moving to the city with his mother. Stories of model C life as a young black kid. Khaya connects these worlds to the world I am much more familiar with: Cape Town, Joburg, corporate life and the world of marketing.

This allows him to transport me to faraway Dutyini, a little nearer to Mdantsane, and so close to me in Cape Town, where we were close enough to bump into each other, and yet his story was so different to mine.

This book ends with stories of great sadness.  Khaya tells the stories of the loss of his brother and mother with authenticity and courage, processing his emotions, his feelings of culpability. 

The intimacy makes this book feel almost holy to me.

You already have a view on Elon Musk. Your view may have been shaped by the allure of his achievements, or perhaps a repulsion at something he said, or even by a sense of patriotism – one of our South Africans has achieved so much.

Whatever your view, it probably isn’t right.

Elon is a stranger beast than I had ever imagined. It is to our great benefit that one of our generation’s best biographers, Walter Isaacson, was allowed into an almost boundary-crossing intimacy with Musk. And it’s to Musk’s credit that he clearly didn’t care what Isaacson wrote.

The result is an extraordinarily intimate telling of the life of Elon Musk up to 2023. It avoids the oversimplifying traps of villainising or glorifying. Isaacson’s guiding light as a biographer is that the answer to every question the reader asks is, “Let me tell you a story,” and man, are there stories.

It leaves us with an unusual paradox. Elon is way more impressive than I had realised. One can almost feel the intensity he creates, enjoy the hierarchy he crashes, admire the new thinking he forces. The insane focus and drive are just breathtaking. At the same time, he seems wracked by his trauma, leaving a wake of personal destruction. I am not at all drawn to be like him, and I don’t want to work with anyone like him.

This is the twist at the heart of the Musk story. It is so unusual to see an impressive performance and yet be repelled. Normally, achievement triggers inspiration – but not here. And we are left with that sad feeling that the trauma inflicted on Musk, and now passed on by Musk to those around him, might just be a necessary condition for his particular type of achievement.

Since this book, Musk’s influence has only grown. If you want to understand the awkward, crazy cipher that seems built for the meme generation, this book is a great place to start.

One enduring reminder from this book: Beware of people with enormous moral goals. Any sacrifice is worth it to achieve such a goal, but you might be the sacrifice.