Adii Pienaar

I’ve heard Dave Hause explain that Damn Personal is a song he wrote about a dear friend.

Whenever I listen to it, though, I hear the words as if I’m singing and saying it to myself. It never fails to strike a chord.

In acknowledging my tendency to push beyond my natural bounds, these lyrics from the songs especially resonate:

“I hope you’re every little thing that I can’t be tonight. (…) I hope you know I’m thinking of you, and I love you because you took it a little too far”

There is magic in not letting oneself off the hook entirely.

I mean, I am the common denominator in all of my mistakes.

At the same time, there is magic in allowing oneself just enough grace actually to move forward. Stagnation is always the worst outcome.

What I truly love about these lyrics is that despite the imperfection (“taking things a little too far”), there is still love.

The nature of that love might not be despite the imperfection but because of it.

Regarding self, I at least recognise that the most likely path to happiness/success/[add positive noun] is to be uniquely myself.

This inevitably requires holding myself to a higher standard and cutting myself some slack daily.

I’ve been traveling in the last week, and on a recent late-night walk around the city, I found myself (yet again) making plans.

Always thinking, ideating and being ambitious.

This wasn’t new or alien to me. I’ve defaulted to this natural state and motion for as long as I can remember.

As I walked*, a simple thought popped into my mind:

My aspirations can never exceed what I have to give.

I find myself in a proverbial half-time of my life, and my recent past has pushed me to re-program some of the things that have felt so natural until now.

I’ve realised that this always-on, constantly pushing forward motion is not very natural. And especially not when I’m trying to alter reality.

Instead, what is more natural (and thus better and sustainable) is to push only within my capacity.

Success is not to be measured by (artificially) trying to give 110% of myself to anything. I now think this is a fallacy. I can never be more than 100%, so where does that mythical extra 10% come from?

Aspiring always to be my best, unique self is already 100%.

No need to risk burnout or other adverse second-order effects by convincing myself I need to or can push beyond that.

And if I just did that, I would still likely accomplish many of the aspirational, ambitious things that often occupy by mind.

*Probably bouncing with some air-drumming as I was also listening to some (angsty) punk rock.

Years ago, I read Eliot Peper's Breach, and I have always thought that these two passages from the book beautifully make a case for authenticity:

“Instead of trying to cover up the damage, the repair is illuminated, the imperfections transformed into a source of beauty. I’ve always seen kintsugi as a physical manifestation of mono no aware, the pathos of impermanence, the gentle awareness that everything, all of us, are fragile and transient, that change is the only constant, that we are, at our best, lovingly reconstructed patchworks of our shattered selves.”

"It was possible to be both broken and beautiful at the same time. Restoration was an act of becoming. Every song was a remix. Every tale was a retelling. Creation was reconfiguration. Things that fell apart could be made whole, and even transcend themselves."

I understand the instinct to want to hide one's imperfections and put one's best foot forward. I also appreciate the benefit of being able to do this well consistently.

However, this approach is somewhat counter-intuitive to our inherent human nature, which includes imperfections and missteps.

The above passages are not only a call to embrace those imperfections as a way to just represent and be as-is. It also invites us to believe that a transcendent experience might occur because we do so.

There is this beautifully striking passage from Ruha Benjamin in a recent podcast with Trevor Noah:

“I think part of it is that I don’t identify strongly with this very uptight, insulated sort of ideal of what it means to be an academic or professor. I have one foot in the academy and always one foot out. I will never turn to these institutions for my sense of self-worth or self or mission. It’s like, I don’t give them my all, and so they can’t take anything from me in doing this either.”

Capitalism rewards obsession, passion and diligence. Especially when you’re all-in.

We understand that this laser-focus is one of the most reliable paths to progress.

The challenge is that when we go all-in on something, our ego attaches our self to this thing.

And that is the riskiest of places. That is the place that burns us out, partly because we’ve convinced ourselves of that supposed truth.

The better truth is that the longer we can run, the further we’ll get. One foot in front of another, all applied in the general direction of a finish line.

Some parts of what comes next will suck. Others will be downhill.

Neither should diminish your conviction, and neither is a measure of who you are.

When you survive this onslaught on self, you have so much capacity for tackling the real world problems you have already identified.

I was writing my second post for the day just now.

For a split second when I was done, I considered not publishing it today and instead schedule it for tomorrow. (Or worse, just keep it in the backlog for a rainy day.)

Somewhere along the way, I had internalised the supposed* content marketing best practice: picking a consistent publishing cadence and sticking to it.

Something about creating expectations with your audience and then delivering on them. Blah, blah.

In being free, I quickly asked, "Who made this a rule for my blog?"

Unless I had made the rule (which I had not), the only obvious thing to do was hit publish immediately, which I did.

And I'll double down on that by publishing this post as soon as it's done.

*I say supposed not because I think it's bad advice or that it wouldn't work. But it's unchallenged and invalidated within the context to which I almost applied it.

h/t to Andy Hawthorne.

I stumbled upon his blog this morning and read a few of his blog posts.

I noticed his haphazard writing cadence, which undoubtedly influenced my awareness to say, "f*ck it" in publishing my post.

Andy's writing cadence emboldened me; maybe his way is a better rule for me to live and write by.

Maybe this wasn't Andy's intention when he wrote "What's The Point Of Blogging?" but this resonated with me:

That's what makes blogs valuable. Not because they're definitive. But because they start conversations.

In this case, it wasn't a single blog post, but the very way in which he was blogging that has sparked me to add to the conversation.