#182: Rugby, wine & Aliens
“If you don’t know who you are, anyone can name you”
Michael Meade
Dear Friends
Last week’s Rugby World Cup win gave South Africa and Africa much joy. Today’s letter includes two more lessons from Rassie Erasmus’s Stories of Life and Rugby and then we step into some lessons from actress Sigourney Weaver and winemaker Duncan Savage.
If you missed last week’s letter, here it is. Thank you for all the kind messages, and for sharing it so widely. You can subscribe to this letter here.
/ strategy
When Erasmus took his first coaching job, as the Cheetah’s head coach, he encountered a problem that many managers do, his ambitions were bigger than his board’s budget.
They left him with limited choices. He needed to find another way. He knew that if he could fill the stadium, it would inspire the players. If they played well the fans would come back. If they came back, others would want to come and so he could get the wheel to start to turn and steadily improve the revenue he needed to invest in his team.
His solution?
He got the most recognizable players – people like Os du Randt and Naka Drotské – out into the Friday morning traffic. Their job? Hand out tickets and ask people to attend.
He says, “It was interesting to watch the reaction when people saw Os peering through their car window. If Os gave you two tickets for Saturday’s game, you were definitely going”.
Du Randt is a 1,90m (6ft 3) 135kg farmer. He’s persuasive.
Later that year, Erasmus took his team to their first Currie Cup win in twenty-nine years. It started with him using what he had. It’s a tactic filmmaker Robert Rodriguez used to make El Mariachi, the cheapest film ever released by a studio – it won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Y Combinator founder, Paul Graham calls it Do Things That Don’t Scale.
You can do more than you think you can.
The second lesson is this, in the 2019 World Cup (which South Africa also won), controversy surrounded fullback Willie le Roux. Unbeknownst to fans, he was carrying a bad shoulder injury, the pain of which had caused him to drop several up-and-unders. Couch coaches were calling for him to be dropped.
Erasmus reflects, “Willie came up to me and said if I was having to cover up too much for him because of the negativity back home, then I should drop him from the team. I wasn’t prepared to do that. I had organised a highlights package of Willie’s best moments in the previous four games and showed the video to the team. None of the players was in any doubt that Willie’s contribution to the team was immense. That gave him the confidence to carry on, and he was one of the outstanding players in those final two matches”.
We will all have off periods. Talented people in our teams will go through rough patches. Great leaders help them find the courage to carry on and inspire others to support them.
You’ll remember a few weeks ago I reflected on captain Siya Kolisi’s defense of another player, Manie Libbok. It is not difficult to see the seeds of that moment in this earlier act of leadership. Our actions, for good and bad, are contagious.
// self
Guy Raz’s The Great Creators, in which he interviews some of the world’s finest creatives, is one of my favourite podcasts.
If you’re my vintage, you know without hesitation who Ellen Ripley is. Even if you’re younger, you’ll instantly recognise the iconic pictures of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. It was a film and a role that broke convention and created new possibilities. Raz’s interview with Weaver is worth every minute.
It starts with us discovering that she named herself Sigourney. Yep, until she was 11 her name was Susan, most people called her Suzie. At 11, she shot up and towered above her peers. She reflects that she was awkward, self-conscious, and shy. She tells Raz “I was so tall; I wanted a longer name”.
Reading the Great Gatsby, she discovered a name that she felt was long enough to reflect who she was becoming, Sigourney, and decided “this looks like the name for me, I am going to graduate to this name…” Suzie become Sigourney.
It’s a tactic pursued by many creative people. Dwight became Elton. Deborah became Skin. There are countless examples. Each one used a new name to mark a new path.
Whether intentionally or not, we name ourselves. We attach labels to who we think we are. They can free us. They can imprison us.
If you doubt me, think about something you can’t do. You’ve just named yourself that person who can’t do that thing. Now change it. Declare yourself to be the person who can do that thing.
How does that feel?
I’ll share more lessons from Weaver and Raz’s conversation next week.
/// soul
I often miss important moments. My family is used to receiving birthday gifts weeks, sometimes months, occasionally a year or two after the event. The same is true for those ‘get this now’ offers. I procrastinate until they’re gone. I sometimes overcompensate and gifts arrive early, or I buy all of everything just in case and then am grumpy because I blew the budget. I rarely get it right But, this year, with Savage Wines at least, I did.
As befits a Winemaker of the Year, a title he held in 2022, his wines sell out in a heartbeat. In 2021, I lost out. This year, the email landed; I placed the order. Success. I secured my Syrahs and snapped up some limited-release Grenache, Chenin, and Straw Wine named variously ‘Thief in The Night’, ‘Never Been Asked To Dance’, and ‘Not Tonight Josephine’.
I am sure when I tell you of the Cape’s wines you imagine vineyards sprawling through green valleys whilst ancient mountains and hungry raptors keep a watchful eye. You wouldn’t be wrong; many are exactly that. The tasting rooms feel like chapels. All the cliches apply, quiet cool air, high ceilings, hushed tones, specks of dust bathed in amber light. Of course, some are glitzy and shiny, but those aren’t what you imagine when I say ‘Cape’s wines’.
Savage Wines is far from both those worlds. Tucked down a Salt River side street just outside Cape Town’s city center, it is an urban world of wine.
Cracked tar, scraggly weeds, concrete, and the faded paints of light industrial buildings might once have claimed to be grey or beige, never exciting to start with, now uncertain about what they are, are the pathway to Savage Wines. And yet, with not a yellow brick in sight, with no tree to take us far away, Duncan Savage makes magic. There’s soul in the surprise, a reminder that we can name an old urban factory, winery, and with intentional action, that is what it becomes.
What is your name?
As the Zen koan encourages “Find the face you had before you were born”.
All the best
Karl (some call me Karlito, others Karlos, one even Kalashnikov, another Brigante, a few Karly – I try not to encourage that one)