308: What We Choose

Good morning friends

It’s been a good week. It started with a message from a former colleague, “Love how you write”, then Tando Ntunja wrote this about me; author Mphuthumi Ntabeni thought my reflections on his recently released book Multitudes warranted this.

I share this because for the longest time I was, and still mostly am, the person who declined offers, who stood back when chances were given – ‘give it to someone more deserving’ – who deflected compliments, who, when asked what gift I’d like, would say ‘Nothing. Don’t go to any trouble’.

My coaching practice has taught me this: receiving compliments and gifts allows people in, accepting generosity is its own form of generosity; refusing help can be selfish.

For some of us, it takes courage. I regularly ask my clients to accept help; to not discount the awards they receive nor diminish people’s appreciation of them.

Sometimes I ask them to actively seek it, to surround themselves with people they trust and ask for compliments. Because I work the way I do, I say, “Tell them not to be abstract or general. By all means say I am kind, but please give the specific example of when, where and how”.

It’s one thing to hear we’re lovely, and then in the quiet of night, old doubts grind it to dust, but when we’re told we’re lovely because of something we did, and we know that we did, well, that’s incontrovertible; no matter what the wind whispers, that fact stands granite-strong.  

And that was me taking my own counsel😉 Let’s get to it.

/strategy
Biologist Roger Payne bravely asked novelist Cormac McCarthy for feedback on early drafts of his book, Among Whales.

Among McCarthy’s many comments, he wrote, “If you assume a low level of intelligence in the reader, you will be left precisely with that readership. Is that really what you want?”

True in writing, true in life and leadership.

It’s important to note that McCarthy, where deserved, balanced the blunt – “Roger: I read this in tears” reflecting on Payne’s beautiful account of Patagonia.

They became lifelong friends; criticism – fairly offered – can be the fuel of love.

(The quotations come from a NYT article: Cormac McCarthy Did Not Talk Craft, With One Surprising Exception).

//self
In the introduction to Walter Sisulu: A Sense of Outrage, Roger Southall writes “… while Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo all played their highly distinctive parts in the ANC’s struggle for freedom, they constituted a collectivity of leadership which has no rival in any other political movement or party of the twentieth century”.   

It is remarkable. Over decades, they transformed and led an organisation that ultimately freed tens of millions and inspired the world. They did so confronting the oppression, violence and brutality, the prisons, the torture, the assassinations and murders of the apartheid state.

They did it with no job description, no KPIs or OKRs. Heck, they even did it remotely – Tambo in London, Mandela and Sisulu on Robben Island.

Southall reflects on the histories and biographies written about them and their leadership: “Yet what is common to them all is a remarkable consensus about the strength of the bond between the three men, which spanned over five decades…”.

Simply, they were friends united in purpose.

///soul
David Szalay’s Flesh won 2025’s Booker Prize. It is a tragic tale. The story of a man who has a life but never gets to live it, who never really knows, nor expresses, what he wants from life, and so it happens to him.

He reaches for life, for love, sometimes with instinctual generosity without thinking of himself. As so often happens, more than we would like to admit, the world does not reciprocate, and he does not know how to shape it. He wants love, growth, security and calm. He does not know how to get it. 

It ends as it begins, with István living with his mother. Then, she dies.

“The funeral is in the town cemetery, not far from where they live.
It’s May. The chestnut trees are in flower.
A few of his mother’s friends are there.
When it’s over he sits on a bench. The dry petals of chestnut flowers fall onto the path. They move on the asphalt with a papery sound, and when the wind stops they lie still. He watches them for a while. Then he stands up and walks back to the flat. After that he lives alone.”

The page before, he is offered a promotion to deputy head of security at the store where he works as a guard. It’s not the first time. He turns it down. Again. When the young manager, at least twenty years his junior, asks why, he replies, “I don’t know. It’s just not for me”. There’d been a time István drove a Bentley and lived in a mansion.

Flesh starts in tragedy.

The police ask István whether he intended to kill the man who died. We know he didn’t. He was a child in anguish.
István doesn’t know. He reflects:

“He did push him down the stairs.
He pushed him.
And it’s hard to say what his intention was.
It’s hard to say what his intention was when he did that, when he pushed the man and he fell down the stairs and hit his head on the metal handrail and then lay on the concrete floor of the half-landing, next to his wife’s plants and didn’t get up.”

Luke Brown, in an FT review, reflects, “There must be two or three hundred lines of dialogue that consist of answering a question (how he found fighting in Iraq, or working the door of a strip club, or visiting Venice) with the word ‘okay’”.

István shrugs often. He never finds the language for his life. His relationships are mostly compromised from their beginning. For a while, he is married. They have a child. His wife has inherited wealth, but only for a while; there’s a countdown ticking. The affluence they live in is temporary. He needs a plan to secure it.

Szalay places him on a pool lounger, reading Lafley and Martin’s Playing to Win, the story of the strategy that revived P&G, seeking inspiration, hoping it will help him hold to the life he had stumbled into. It doesn’t.

You want him to win. You know he won’t. Perhaps if he had the language, perhaps if he had more than okay, but he doesn’t.

With love,

Karl

PS: I have space to work with two new clients. If you’d like to be one of them, you can find out more about my method here and, if it feels like a fit for you, email and we can have an introductory conversation.