Edwin's Corner

  Read: Part One  Michael did not look like her father. That would have been too easy. He did not arrive drunk for their first date. He did not slap her. He did not tell her that women were useless. He listened. He laughed. He noticed small things. He remembered what she liked. He admired her intelligence rather than feeling threatened by it. Most importantly, Michael made Apondi feel something she rarely let herself feel: wanted. She had spent most of her life being useful, but useful and wanted were not the same. Michael seemed to want her even when she produced nothing. For a woman whose entire identity had been built around performance, that feeling was intoxicating. She fell hard. Her siblings were less enthusiastic. Her older brother noticed things — the little jokes at her expense, Michael’s dislike of being contradicted, and how quickly his charm turned cold when he did not get his way. Her older sister noticed how he spoke about his previous girlfriends: apparently, e...

Apondi was born on a Friday. Her mother said that meant she was lucky. For years, Apondi wondered whether the luck had been delivered to the wrong child — because if any had visited their small village home, it had done so very quietly. Her father was a soldier. Or, more accurately, he had been one. He had seen combat earlier in life, before an injury ended his military career. He had come home honorably discharged, carrying a small pension, a soldier’s discipline, a body that had known violence, and perhaps wounds nobody in the village knew how to ask about. As the only son, he settled on his father’s land. He planted maize, grew sugarcane, drank, and terrorized his family. There were five children in the house — though everyone knew there were others scattered among different women; Apondi never quite knew how many. Her father was amorous when he wanted to be loved, authoritarian when he wanted to be obeyed, and terrifying when he had been drinking. Nobody challenged him. Once, the v...

  Previously in part one  The room went quiet. Not ordinary quiet — the kind of quiet in which even memories seem to take their seats. James held the letter. Their father’s handwriting was unmistakable: strong, deliberate, and annoyingly confident. Even from the grave, the man seemed incapable of a tentative statement. James read on. My sons, If you are reading this, one of you probably believes he has won — and the other believes he has lost. If I know my sons, James is angry that I anticipated this, and Mathew is trying not to smile. James looked up. Mathew was trying not to smile. “Ridiculous man,” James muttered. “Keep reading.” James did. I have spent much of my life teaching you both how to succeed, how to work, how to negotiate, how to recognize opportunity, how to read people, how to build and how to protect what you build, how to make money, and how to compete. What I am less sure of is whether I taught you how to become men capable of safely carrying success. That fa...

These were the sunset years of the old man’s life. He knew it. His doctors knew it. His wife knew it. And his two sons pretended not to. From his bedroom window, he could see parts of the empire he had spent most of his life building — the buildings, the trucks, the warehouses, the hotels, the factories, the offices. Billions in assets. Thousands of employees. A family name that could open doors before anyone had knocked. Yet toward the end, none of it troubled him as much as his two sons. James and Mathew. They had come from the same house. Ate at the same table. Had been punished by the same father and sent out to work during the same school holidays. And somehow, they had grown into completely different men. James had always been a lion — at least, that was how he described himself. A lion prowled. A lion dominated. A lion did not ask permission. And, according to the gospel of James, a lion certainly did not come in second. School, therefore, was never merely school. It was a battl...

When I met Jimmy, he was going through a very hard time. He was doing design work. A poster here. A small job there. A thousand shillings if he was fortunate. But even those small jobs seemed to take an exhausting amount of effort. He had to self-promote continually by calling and messaging people, explaining his capabilities, and persuading them of his skills. Often, he would almost beg for a chance to showcase his expertise. Yet, despite all this hard work, a client might only give him a single job before vanishing. Jimmy didn’t just see it as a client disappearing; he interpreted it as something significant. This distinction is crucial because in the Clarity Room we’ve repeatedly discussed that what happens to us and what we make of it are not the same thing. An experience occurs, and we assign meaning to it. This meaning begins forming beliefs. Beliefs influence what we notice. What we notice influences how we feel. Our emotions influence our decisions. And eventually our decisio...