Adii Pienaar

As I clicked publish on yesterday's post, I also clicked through to my blog to just check that it had not broken anything on my site (considering the other changes I made recently to remove things like newsletter signups).

It looked fine, so I closed the browser tab.

I immediately felt this odd sense of being free.

Usually, when publishing a post, I'd check - and keep refreshing - all the metrics I was tracking: views, newsletter opens, etc.

I would have to draft punchy versions of the post to share on X and LinkedIn because I would've been chasing engagement in the past.

But now I have none of that, and I instinctively sensed that as I hit publish yesterday.

I didn't have to spend any mental cycles thinking about what I had just done. There was no goal. Nothing had to come from it.

All of the value of doing the thing (writing, in this case) had already accrued to me.

I've ignorantly and without any planning stumbled into some things that have had a material impact in shaping my life.

One of those things was writing. It was something I had always enjoyed, and then I stumbled onto WordPress/blogging and became a prolific writer for a few years. I would write and publish whatever I wanted.

I regret that in one of the many changes to my blog over the years, I got lazy in one of those changes, and I lost years' worth of writing. Fortunately (with some work), The Internet Archive has retained some nostalgic gems I wrote 17 years ago.

Doing some post-rationalisation with all of the benefit of hindsight, I can't tell you why I published that. Except that, I felt the urge to do so, and I'd imagine I derived some joy from doing it.

In the last 17 years, I have had fits and spurts of writing more and less. More interestingly, I've published less and less as every year passes.

Part of this is because writing - and publishing - became content marketing. I had experienced the power of having an audience, and I was patently aware that there were a lot of tips, tricks and best practices for making your writing work for you.

But writing became work for me.

It became another thing I needed to be good at to pursue my broader goal of progressing in life and business. I had utterly lost the ignorance of just being able to write and publish for the sake of it.

Almost a year ago to the day, I was contemplating something similar, and I concluded that post by saying:

"...in this season of my life, I will write what I like."

But I never did.

Instead, for a few weeks, I embarked on toying with a new workflow that would take some ideas I had, and then, with the help of voice note transcription and genius LLMs, I'd efficiently turn them into punchy blog posts that I could publish here. I had a plan, too: this content was designed to build attention and eyeballs that I could divert to my new (paid) written project (R.I.P.). A little extra, fun wine money has never hurt anyone.

I never published any of those because I didn't feel like me. Part of the fun of writing is to figure out how I best communicate this idea or thought in my head. It does not have to be optimised for another purpose if the only real goal is to get that thought out of my head.

So, I recently decided to go almost dark on this blog in favour of writing just what I like.

There's no more newsletter here. Unless someone else shares it, this blog post won't make it onto X (where I've not been active for months and have locked my account). Nobody might read this. Unless, of course, they intentionally type adii.me into their web browser to come here.*

And that feels just about right at the moment.

(*I am curious and excited about Ghost's work with ActivityPub and will likely participate in and push my content into the fediverse as soon as I can.)

I've been told that (when writing) one should lead with the hook and not bury the lede. So, I'll start by telling you that I got terrible news on Friday that ~35% of my financial portfolio vanished.

Read more...

After wrapping up Cogsy last year through an acquihire and voluntary liquidation (I shared the whole journey in great detail here), I found myself asking a similar question that I'd been wondering about on and off over the years: Who is Adii if Adii is not an entrepreneur?

The biggest part of me just wants to Adii, and I've realised that I have a testy relationship with labels.

Do I have some or even most characteristics associated with a typical entrepreneur? Yes.

Am I a dad? Well, yes, I'm a biological father to three kids. But describing me as a dad feels very limiting.

I can continue in that vein for any other labels that might be useful in describing who I am. My point is that I've never found a single label or word that completely describes me, and I wholeheartedly expect the same to be true for you.

My attachment to "entrepreneur," though, is a little harder to shake completely. This is possible because my work has been a huge component of my life, and in many ways, it was probably the first step to discovering so many other parts of me. So I'm back asking the same question.

Who is Adii if Adii is not an entrepreneur?

When I joined Automattic at the start of the year, part of my motivation was to figure out whether I could do meaningful and impactful work within a much larger organisation that I don't own or where I'm not the boss. In that context, I can then probably reframe that question to something like, "How do Adii's entrepreneurial traits show up in this role?"

First, I've learned that this line of inquiry is limited because it extends only to this role and my work. So, it ignores the greater consideration of what this means in the context of my life. (If you've read Life Profitability, you'll know that I believe work is just part of life.)

That first learning then unlocks a completely different perspective. One where - upon reflection - I've boiled down what it means to me to "be an entrepreneur". I realised that the "entrepreneur" label resulted from me doing things. The motivation for doing those things was not "to be an entrepreneur", though.

As I'm re-thinking entrepreneurship, I'd like to share an updated definition of what it means to me today:

1. Entrepreneurship is about doing meaningful things. We attach meaning to many things, but I highly doubt that it is limited to making money or doing one thing (work) for 40 hours a week.
2. The "way I work" is way more important than I thought. There is freedom in being flexible according to your definition and choosing with whom you want to work.
3. Earning great money is inherently very rewarding, and at the very least, it is a pragmatic way to root our perspective in a broader reality (actual money is required to put food on the table). Earning too little money to live the life you desire is a problem. Earning more than you need to live your desired life doesn't automatically fix the first two things on this list (or many other challenges in life).

They say that the music you listen to as a teenager is the music that tends to stick with you later in life.

I grew up listening to a local Afrikaans punk band (provocatively) called Fokofpolisiekar. For the last few days, I've been mulling over the lyrics in their song, Swanesang ("Swan song"):

Die oop pad het sy tol ge-eis
Om vinniger daar te kom sal jy vinniger moet ry
Om vinniger te lewe maak jou vinniger dood

Here is my translation into English:

The open road has taken its toll
To arrive there sooner, you will have to drive faster
Living faster will kill you sooner

This strikes a chord. I have always believed that I have had a very full life, and at a relatively young age (39 😅), I've done and experienced quite a lot.

I mostly look upon my past with great fondness and gratitude, partly because I recognise the good fortune along the way. I also know that I had a near single-minded focus on progress and success for many parts of my journey. I was enamoured with the idea of arriving at the destination, and I got lucky in that I also mostly enjoyed the journey on the way there.

I learnt much later in life that I was also ignorant of the costs that this journey and pursuit created. (My book, Life Profitability, is my best attempt at capturing these lessons.)

The biggest challenge along the way was those moments of the journey that were uncertain, risky, or incredibly tough. In those moments, the experience of the journey was not what made me show up to do the work. Instead, I stuck to the vision of reaching the destination. I learnt grit and resilience and learned more about myself than I could have hoped.

In that, there is also a double-edged sword.

Fokofpolisiekar's song continues:

Slagoffer van jou eie verbeelding
Die droom het 'n nagmerrie geword
Skuldig bevind, morele verkragting

Again, with a translation in my words:

Victim of your own imagination
The dream has become a nightmare
Guilty as charged, moral abuse

So much of who I am lives in the future, and I've had to learn and improve how I live in the present moment. Today, there is a strong correlation between my ability to be consciously in this moment and my general sense of happiness, contentment, connection, and meaning.

I still imagine that future state, though. I have ideas, dreams and unknowns that I'm curious about.

As an entrepreneur, I have also learnt how to distil that dreamy future state into the next three steps I need to take to start progressing. Venturing into the unknown, I have successfully turned an idea into reality.

One of the ways I do that is by really investing myself into the thing I'm working on or doing. I do the same in my relationships. I wear my heart on my sleeve. WYSIWYG. Vulnerability is a natural and comfortable state for me.

And, when the world (where I don't exert control) throws a few curveballs, it's hard not to feel like the dream has become a nightmare. It's hard not to feel captured by my imagination.

I'm still figuring this out. And maybe I'll imagine a version of the truth that calms this enquiry for a new season of life.

In the meantime, I'll meditate on this:

“But who is the thinker—this thinker who has all these thoughts?” Is there a thinker at all, or only thought which puts together the thinker?"

- Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Only Revolution