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The Intelligent Investor

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The Intelligent Investor: Discipline, Temperament, and the Moral Psychology of Markets Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor is not merely a book about stocks; it is a treatise on human behavior under uncertainty. Beneath its conservative tone and methodical prose lies a radical claim: successful investing is less about intelligence and prediction than about character, discipline, and emotional self-mastery. Markets, Graham insists, are not efficient machines dispensing truth but theaters of mood, fear, and overconfidence. To invest intelligently is therefore to understand oneself as much as one understands balance sheets. This insight—so often paraphrased yet rarely fully absorbed—has made The Intelligent Investor one of the most enduring works in financial literature. Read superficially, it appears dated: references to railroads, preferred stocks, and post-war bond yields abound. Read properly, it reveals a philosophy that transcends time, technology, and market fa...
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CATS

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CATS At the Teatro to watch a show about Cats. Cats are everywhere, fur naturalistic, fantastic make-up, the performers stayed in role the whole time. They were cats, inquisitive, sensual and alluring without meaning to.  Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats is built on T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of poems that already resist conventional narrative. Webber doesn’t “adapt” them into a linear story—he creates a ritual. What you’re watching is less a plot-driven musical and more a ceremonial gathering: the Jellicle Ball. Once a year, the Jellicle cats assemble to present themselves—body, memory, instinct, desire—so that one may be chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn. That’s it. No villain, no quest, no romance arc. The drama is existential. And that’s where cats become not just a choice, but the only possible choice. Why cats? Why not people? Cats exist in a perfect symbolic middle-ground: They live with humans but ar...
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Good to Great

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Good to Great: The Anatomy of Sustained Excellence Good to Great begins with a brutal premise: good is the enemy of great. Most companies do not fail. They settle.  Comfort, competence, and incremental success create a sedative effect. Collins’ question is therefore not why companies collapse, but why so few ever transcend adequacy. The answer is unsettling: greatness is not achieved through brilliance, charisma, or radical change. It is achieved through unromantic consistency. Level 5 Leadership: Power Without Ego At the center of every good-to-great transformation stands a Level 5 Leader—a figure almost invisible by modern standards. These leaders are not celebrated visionaries. They avoid the spotlight, deflect praise, and absorb blame. Their defining traits are humility and iron will. This leadership model is psychologically radical. Power is exercised without exhibition. Ambition exists, but it is directed toward the institution, not the self. The leader’s ego is s...
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Built to Last

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Built to Last: Visionary Companies and the Architecture of Endurance Most companies are born with ambition. Very few are born with longevity. Built to Last begins with a deceptively simple question: Why do some companies endure for generations while others, equally brilliant in their moment, fade into irrelevance? Jim Collins and Jerry Porras do not seek charismatic leaders, clever strategies, or perfect timing as their answer. Instead, they uncover something more unsettling—and more powerful: enduring greatness is designed, not improvised. The Core Paradox: Stability and Change At the heart of Built to Last lies a paradox that contradicts much modern business mythology. Visionary companies are fanatically stable at their core yet relentlessly adaptive in everything else. While ordinary companies chase trends, visionary companies anchor themselves to a core ideology—a combination of core values and core purpose that remains untouched by markets, technologies, and leadership...
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Brave New World

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Brave New World: The Tyranny of Happiness and the Death of the Soul Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is not a novel about oppression in its obvious, brutal form. There are no jackboots, no gulags, no public executions. Instead, it presents something far more unsettling: a civilization that has solved suffering—and in doing so, abolished humanity. Huxley’s dystopia does not rule by fear, but by pleasure; not by censorship, but by saturation; not by violence, but by comfort.  The result is a society in which no one rebels because no one remembers what it means to want something deeply enough to fight for it. Unlike the tyrannies of the past, the World State does not need to silence dissent. It engineers a population incapable of dissent from birth. Conditioning as Destiny From the opening scenes in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, Huxley establishes the novel’s central horror: human beings are manufactured.  Natural birth is obscene. Mothers and fa...
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1984

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1984 : Power, Truth, and the Architecture of the Mind George Orwell’s 1984 is not merely a dystopian novel; it is an anatomy of power at its most refined and merciless. Written in the aftermath of World War II and under the long shadow of totalitarian regimes, the novel functions as a philosophical warning disguised as fiction. Orwell does not predict the future so much as reveal a pattern: how power consolidates, how truth dissolves, and how the human soul is reshaped when language, memory, and fear are brought under absolute control. At its core, 1984 asks a devastating question: What happens to the individual when reality itself becomes a political instrument? The World of Oceania: Power Without Justification Oceania is ruled by the Party, an entity so abstract that it becomes godlike. Unlike traditional tyrannies that justify themselves through ideology, religion, or promises of prosperity, the Party offers no ultimate justification. Power is not a means to an end; it...
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The Art of War

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Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: Strategy as the Highest Form of Intelligence Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is often misunderstood because it has been quoted too frequently and read too shallowly. It appears on corporate PowerPoint slides, leadership seminars, and motivational posters—usually reduced to clichés about “knowing your enemy” or “choosing battles wisely.” But The Art of War is not a book about aggression. It is a book about restraint, perception, and the invisible mechanics of power. At its core, it is a philosophy that treats war as a tragic failure of politics, to be concluded swiftly, intelligently, and with minimal bloodshed. Unlike later Western military theorists such as Clausewitz, who framed war as the continuation of politics by other means, Sun Tzu frames war as something to be avoided if possible, and ended before it begins if unavoidable. Victory, for Sun Tzu, is not measured by conquest but by control without destruction. This inversion is what makes The Art of...
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The 50th Law

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The 50th Law: Fearlessness as Power in a World Built on Anxiety Robert Greene’s The 50th Law, co-authored with Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, stands apart from Greene’s other works not because it abandons strategy, but because it strips strategy down to its rawest psychological core: fear. Where The 48 Laws of Power teaches manipulation, misdirection, and control, The 50th Law asks a more unsettling question—what happens when fear disappears entirely? The answer, Greene suggests, is not recklessness, but sovereignty. This book is not a motivational manifesto, nor is it a gangster memoir disguised as philosophy. It is a meditation on power from the perspective of those who begin with nothing—no safety net, no institutional protection, no illusions about fairness. By pairing Greene’s historical analysis with 50 Cent’s lived experience of poverty, violence, betrayal, and reinvention, The 50th Law becomes a study in fearlessness as an existential stance, not a personality trait. At ...
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Cold genealogy of Power: The Prince & The 48 Laws of Power

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From Florence to the Boardroom: Machiavelli’s The Prince and Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power Power does not announce itself as evil. It arrives disguised as necessity. Niccolò Machiavelli understood this in sixteenth-century Florence; Robert Greene understands it in corporate offices, political arenas, and social hierarchies centuries later. The Prince and The 48 Laws of Power are separated by time, language, and cultural surface, but they belong to the same bloodline. Greene’s book is not a reinvention of Machiavelli—it is his translation into a world that still pretends to be moral. Together, these texts form a single philosophy: power is amoral, relational, and governed by perception rather than truth. What Machiavelli articulated with brutal minimalism, Greene expands into a manual for psychological warfare in modern life. The Break with Innocence Machiavelli’s great rupture was his refusal to speak of power as it should be. He rejected saints, philosophers, and th...
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Marabi

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Marabi At the Market Theatre for the opening of "Marabi". Piano, Kasi, Stocko, Doornfontein! A full house, everyone in full attendance. The energy palpable, everyone is just excited! It's the first show of the year! Marabi is a South African musical theatre classic adapted from Modikwe Dikobe’s novel The Marabi Dance and originally developed through Junction Avenue Theatre Company workshops. It’s set in the Doornfontein slumpyards, rusted corrugated sheets is the feeling and tone, 1930s - the show tells a powerful story of family, music and change.  The play opens with the Mabongo family, first-generation Black migrants who have come to Johannesburg in search of opportunity but instead face the harsh realities of urban poverty and crowded township life. The central figure, July Mabongo, carries the burden of ancestral expectations, traditional values, and the tension between holding on to the past and surviving in a fast-changing city. ...
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