#232: Building Your 2025 Reading List: Books to Inspire
Good morning dear friends
We are back! Five years ago, to the day, I sent this newsletter to a handful of friends for comment. Since then, I’ve written 232 of them. All of you have kindly joined the ride, sending feedback, making thoughtful recommendations and generally enriching this community and my life. Some of you joined whilst I was taking a break, so apologies for the silence. It is good to have you here. Welcome.
I hope your year has started well. My December was mostly quiet. An annoying virus put paid to wine drinking and long swims, but an ocean-facing couch and pile of good books is hardly the world’s worst punishment. Plus, I was blessed with visits from old friends which is one of life’s finest pleasures.
In South Africa it is matric results time. I approach it with fixed feelings. Some youngsters achieve incredible results, often against all odds, and the fact remains that South Africa’s education system fails to deliver the results it should for the investment it receives.
Nevertheless, I loved this photograph of top-performing matriculant, Rayyan Ebrahim, and Western Cape Education MEC David Maynier. In a world, where principled compassion is often silenced (remember in April 2024, USC cancelled valedictorian Asna Tabbasum’s speech citing security concerns emanating from her social media support for the people of Gaza) it is a real joy to see a young person using his moment in the spotlight to express solidarity, and (arguably in a rare moment) a politician not hiding away. Rayyan passed with an over 97% aggregate and nine distinctions, including 100% for physical science.
I haven’t yet compiled my 2025 reading list, because I am still reading four books, Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, Nathan Thrall’s Pulitzer prize-winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy and Stephen Covey’s classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (which weirdly I’ve never read). I’ll share it when I get there.
If you’re still compiling your list, these are useful places to start. The Guardian has kindly listed all the major fiction and non-fiction releases for the year, by month (click here). Wharton Business School professor, Adam Grant’s reading list is always useful. And for something more unusual check out The Conversation’s 6 best African sci-fi and fantasy books to read.
And if you’re still looking to add something, these are the books I read during 2024.
/strategy
Jeremy Lent’s A Web of Meaning recounts a story about a farmer told by Mencius, a great Chinese sage.
The farmer was concerned his grain was growing too slowly. He decided to help and spent a day pulling them skyward. That evening, he proudly told his family of his efforts to accelerate their crop. His sons rushed out to the fields, and sure enough the grain lay shrivelled on the ground. Dead.
It’s January. The pressure to ensure that we do better, quicker, sooner, bigger than ever before is everywhere. As you experience it, remember the farmer and his grain. Occasionally, we’re all guilty of such wisdom.
(Thank you to Ralph Freese who kindly gifted me Lent.)
//self
Brand Africa founder Thebe Ikalafeng is a multi-award-winning stalwart of South Africa business and marketing. A committed Pan-African, he has built a substantial public presence and is widely sought out for his views on the continent and its businesses.
In a recent African Optimist podcast, host Sanja Gohre asks him how he manages to sell himself so effectively whilst simultaneously being consistently humble. She comments that he never seems to oversell himself.
His response is valuable guidance, “I don’t think I sell myself. I think I present myself as I am. I stay true to myself because if I didn’t, I would trip… I’ve always been the same person. I’ve never changed. I don’t sell my achievements. I focus on results. I focus on change and results and telling stories that contribute to a better society. If that’s what equals selling myself, then I’m okay with selling myself”.
If that farmer had met Ikalafeng, he may have had a crop.
///soul
A recent Stephen King novella, Two Talented Bastids, tells of two friends, one a passionate writer, the other a painter. They run a business together maintaining the town’s dump, and pour their spare time into their creative passions, which are good but never quite good enough.
One night, in a forest, they save an alien’s life (it is Stephen King). In return, in thanks, they’re given a box which when breathed on it unlocks their talent.
Their benefactor explains, “There is no word for what it does except primal. A way to use what you are not using because of the noise in your lives. Because of your thoughts”.
The friends ask, “Does it grant wishes?” The visitor from another planet laughs and says, “Nothing can give you what isn’t already there”.
The noise is quietened, and their talents unlocked, transforming their lives. They go on to great creative success and acclaim.
Years later, when the two talented bastids are both dead, one’s son discovers his father’s journal, learns this story, seeks out and finds the box, and breathes on it hopefully.
As he does so, images of crowd-raising, encore-begging musical performances flitting across his mind. Almost simultaneously, images of his partial efforts at excellence flood in, and he remembers, “Nothing can give you what isn’t already there”.
He waits already knowing that nothing will happen, and nothing does.
If nothing else, I hope you find quiet in the tumult of the year to come. Give your primal talents the space to breathe.
As always, thank you for being here.
You can read past editions of the newsletter here and find our favourite quotations here.
All the very best
Karl
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