Adii Pienaar

This is a follow-up on the original Being Free.

Having gotten into a bit of a groove of writing (and publishing!) here regularly, I've overlooked one of the things that used to trip me up so often when I was writing to achieve a goal.

Picking a good headline.

Sheesh. It's the bane of my existence.

Every single time it became a rabbithole of overthinking and bouncing around between different perspectives or frameworks to pick the best one.

Impulsively I always have a semi-decent and often catchy headline in mind.

Then I realise it's so personal and abstract that it's likely only catchy to me.

I then remind myself that if I can only be clever or clear, I should probably be clear, which means the next iteration is literal and mundane. (Or just literally mundane.)

It's generally at this point that I involve AI in brainstorming other options. Irrespective of how I try to tone down the objective to gamify my headline for our algorithmic overlords, all of the suggestions are perfectly fine and have equal ability to go viral. At that point, I feel all of the ick.

In the last week, I've just picked the first headline that intuitively resonates with me most.

That feels more interesting and authentic.

Plus, I'm not publishing short-form content here or hiding the majority of my writing behind a click. In both those cases, crafting the perfect headline makes sense.

Instead the headlines here are only signposts to say, "A new post starts here."

This is one of those perspectives that I suspect I can exclusively have in hindsight and this season of my life.

At any other point in my journey, I prioritised other things to the extent that I neglected even considering this perspective. Therein probably lies some of the sentiment I attach to this today because I wish I had clearer thoughts about this sooner.

In this moment, I'm energised, inspired and ready to ambitiously pursue building something in South Africa, for South Africa. I want to contribute to something that benefits a greater community/society beyond the direct stakeholders or shareholders of the project.

When I look back though, WooCommerce could've been that in many ways especially considering how the platform has grown since Automattic's acquisition.

I wonder what would've happened had WooCommerce stayed independent and importantly stayed a South African corporation.

Instead of jumping on the remote working and distributed work trends so quickly, I wonder what impact we could've had if we prioritised training and hiring South Africans.

I wonder what could've happened had we helped independent retailers and small businesses in South Africa with free software and services so that they could jump into ecommerce sooner. Would we have seen some local DTC brands use that momentum to grow into multinational empires?

So many positive second-order effects could've occurred had we decided on a more South Africa-first mission.

There are many ifs, buts and maybes in all of this, and the level of my speculation here makes this a personal thought experiment only.

I don't have any regrets, and as I think about building in South Africa, for South Africa in the future, revisiting some personal experiences helps crystallise what could be possible if specific perspectives get enough oxygen at the very start of the journey.

A big part of our world today is about making others believe what you believe.

Capitalism thrives on sales and marketing, which are both a function of great storytelling.

Becoming really good at this is a predictable way to make progress and accumulate wealth.

An obvious and linear rationale would suggest the paths where you can garner the most believe, is also the path to greater progress and wealth.

I would suggest that the path where no one believes what you believe is possibly the more meaningful and rewarding.

Naysayers are inevitably stuck in the status quo which informs current beliefs.

When you’re trying to push beyond that, your conviction should exceed those limiting beliefs inherent in the status quo.

The biggest challenge is maintaining the passion of your conviction when the first person says they don’t agree and believe what you believe. When that happens, you need to find a second and third and fourth person who might believe in what you are convinced about.

Money can buy many things.

Often on the road to making more money, we buy more and/or more expensive things.

And we agree that the smarter is often to save or reinvest that money into something that can make even more money.

Capitalism is beautiful in that way; it can keep on compounding forever. And it can do so exponentially if you keep adding more fuel to the flames.

The even smarter play is when one starts to use money to buy back time or meaningful experiences with those people who matter most in life.

Eventually though even the richest of the rich gets to a point where their financial means at least partly makes them lonely.

As a millionaire, it is easy to throw a party and get people to attend. It’s harder to make them your friend. But money can go a long way to plaster over those cracks.

Money loses it efficacy when I can’t use it to change the society I live in.

Looking at this with my South African tinted glasses: I can use money to insulate myself against many of the challenges in our country. But, what I ultimately desire is to live in a country that is free of crime. That is only achievable (and realistic) when we eradicate poverty and inequalities.

My money is definitely not enough for that, and no well-known, super rich individual can buy that outcome. Changing the status quo requires a collective effort that involves money, but it is not the primary thing:

The original title for yesterday's post was simply "Freedom".

I changed it, because there is a difference to freedom and being free.

In our daily, human lives, we're afforded certain freedoms depending on the specific context. Our freedoms also layer up in different ways, where we have a Constitution as foundation, but can then add agreed freedoms in our workplace or local community or at home.

Beyond that, I also believe that we have an inherit, humanistic freedom that we rarely tap into. In a world, where we're all merely a similar sack of atoms, we're already free from many of the things that we perceive impedes our freedom.

Irrespective of how you define freedom, there is a difference to having access to it and actually being free.

To actually be free, I think we need to travel in two directions:

The first part is a solo player game, where I get to decide how I relate to and experience my own values, standards, goals, dreams, ambitions, fears, desires, and needs.

When I hold these too tightly, take them too seriously or attach myself to them too much, they have the ability to trip me up and make me less free. This is self-inflicted and whenever I get there, I have the opportunity of acknowledging the role my ego plays in that.

The second part is entirely multiplayer. It's all about community, connection and those universal bits that makes all of us the same.

There is a certain safety in the commons. I don't have to stand up or stand out or be different. I struggle with those same very human things that my neighbour suffers with. And when we suffer together, maybe we dissolve this illusion that being human needs to be any different to what it is now.