Adii Pienaar

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

I touched on a bit of this here. The last few weeks since joining Automattic to work on “commerce things” (I’ll keep teasing), I have reconnected with so many friends in the greater WordPress space.

It has been both fun to see a little bit of banter come to life on Twitter (I am holding off on calling it X, because it feels odd):

The interesting part of this is that the ~17K followers I have on Twitter is very similar to the amount of followers I had 10 years ago. My audience was entirely WordPress- and Woo-focused in the early days of my Twitter account, and even though I did so many other things beyond that community in the past 10 years, the size of my audience has not changed.

What’s been interesting is not the size of my audience, but instead seeing familiar names and faces pop into my stream. The same was true of the email newsletter for my previous newsletter: it was the most-read email I had sent in the last couple of years.

There is something to be said about coming home.

Ten years later, home is different to the one I mostly left. But some things and people have stayed the same.

I’m fully immersing myself in updating my understanding of home, and reconnecting with those that have kept the torch burning.

I’m excited to contribute, and maybe bring a few fresh ideas we should explore.

(I’m sure if Small Potato was still around, we’d argue about these ideas and 20-something Adii would be in the comments section of every blog to pour fuel on the flames.)

There are some changes I'm implementing here, and to signify it, I'm borrowing the title of Steve Biko's book "I Write What I Like" because it left such an immense impression on me.

This is one of my favourite quotes from the book:

"...the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

I made a mistake years ago (circa 2009). I updated my WordPress blog (I needed a change), and it was hard to migrate all the content. So, I optimised for "new" and not history. I truly regret that. (Most ironically, I had pushed my open source content to Facebook, which remains the only artefact of my writing before this switch.)

I return to that, because part of me feels like I'm in a "full circle"-type moment.

I have recently joined Automattic (1 January 2024) to work on commerce stuff (I'll keep y'all guessing because: hype). Even though I had left Woo before their acquisition by Automattic, this is still a homecoming of sorts. I'm reconnecting with so many ideas and individuals that have been influential on my journey.

Matt is a prominent protagonist in my journey. I'm late to his call to blog to celebrate his recent 40th birthday, and here is an overdue post. After that, I was fortunate to spend time with him in person for the first time since 2012. His passion for publishing and sharing has only grown since he first convinced me (and us) to change our stance about open source at Woo way back in the day.

With all this, I've been reminded that I used to publish/share whatever mattered to me. And I've been filtering and editing myself extensively since.

I was recently asked about "how I escaped" (sic, the corporate game) by someone following me for years. My reply surprised me. I replied that I felt way freer when I started this journey than now. I have imprisoned and limited myself in what I should do and publish. (Beyond publishing, we should discuss my decision to pursue a role at Automattic versus doing what I've always done: just start a new business.)

There is more to this conversation; in the meantime, I will try writing about what I like. Things like this. Or finally publishing the 70K words I wrote to tell you about the messy middle. I hope that by consistently sharing the things that matter to me, I can give you something from which you can extract value.

At some stage, I'll also probably have to switch my site (which is limited because I'm back to using a $100 template) to WordPress** to align with where I spend my time. For now, the platform matters less than the intent and the words.

The emails might be coming thick and fast (assuming I share well) in the next few weeks. I'd love some feedback, though. What resonates? What works? What else would you like from me?

And if you haven't made the connection yet: I have oppressed myself in this regard. The italics are important because this is not real oppression relative to what happens in the world, and the challenge has been one I've struggled with for years.

If I relented to that oppression, then I'm also giving power to the oppressor of any idea or technology or politic or world view. Instead, I'm aligning with and ambitiously pursuing the mission of Automattic, which is to democratise publishing and commerce (and now messaging).

It has to be a "hell yeah" or no.

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

I first saw a snippet of this on Instagram before finding the full version:

The 2-minute snippet on Instagram wasn't the same quality, and it still made me cry. I often turn to Dave's music to pursue emotion, and just feel.

My emotion in this is a sense of being torn. I've never seen Dave perform live, and I have tickets to see him perform on this Haunted Churces tour in Barcelona or Vienna in the next two weeks. The plan was for Jeanne and I to do a little romantic getaway, but life is too full to contemplate that at the moment.

So, from afar, I'm basking in this emotion and gobbling up all of the fragments of the tour I can.

I borrowed the headline from Viktor Frankl, who wrote one of my favourite books. Reading Man's Search for Meaning fueled my curiosity and created many questions about humanity, specifically how it related to the Holocaust. I have since read a few books about it in an emotive and intense attempt to understand and learn something.

In the stories of suffering and sadness, one of the themes to emerge relates to connection and our shared humanity. It is captured well in one of my favourite paragraphs from the book:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

I started with that because connection has been at the top of my mind lately. I have been feeling a great desire for connection lately, but I don't want it to be frivolous or fleeting; I want it to mean something.

More importantly, I've learned that when connection is present, I'm not in my head so much. I'm part of something bigger. The (my!?) spotlight is not on me.

This takes various shapes depending on the nature of the season (of life) I am in. I wanted to share a few of those with you.

This past Saturday, my little sister (expecting her first kiddo any day now) and her husband had dinner at our place. During the evening, they asked Jeanne & I whether we'd be guardians for their son should anything happen to them. They said they admire our parenting and the kids we are raising. Not even religious beliefs (I'm not and consider myself a humanist) derailed the conversation or sentiment. Incredibly warm fuzzies were had all around. Maybe "connection" is easier with family, but it's also sometimes hard due to historical issues (irrespective of whether they are relevant). This was such a meaningful conversation, though, and I went to bed with a happy heart.

On Sunday morning, I woke up at 5 am to watch the UFC fight between Sean Strickland and Dricus du Plessis. A key point to note here is that I have never watched a UFC fight, but Dricus du Plessis is South African, and the hype around the fight had even reached me. Dricus won, and this scene from his post-fight celebration is electric.

I'll quickly translate what Dricus said into my own interpretation, too. He said, "Now they know what we know." He alludes to a perception that South Africa - and thus South Africans - are underdogs. But we're built differently (in our opinion), and we can achieve great things. There is a general sense that we - as a "small" country, need to prove ourselves to gain respect. Dricus did that by being the first African to be a UFC champion.

In this context, I am another South African watching a fight on my TV. But seeing how much this means to Dricus and how he connects with a whole nation (or an idea thereof) makes it impossible not to be swept up in this patriotic elation. You can draw the lines as you please, but it is hard not to connect with this shared emotion. I am part of that merely because I was born in South Africa.

I subsequently channelled all of that energy into a 12km run, during which I was absolutely bouncing. This is significant because I had knee surgery in November and only started running again a few weeks ago.

I want to try connecting that sentiment and experience with where I am professionally today, too. I suspect that many of my readers at least first followed me because of my perceived professional success.

This desire for connection has also greatly influenced how I think about work in this season of life.

After Cogsy didn't achieve the outcome we had aspired to achieve last year (more on this soon), some soul-searching helped me realise that I didn't want to build something from scratch in this season of life. Instead, what was clear to me is that I wanted to do meaningful and impactful work.

At the start of the year, I joined Automattic as "Head of WooNew." My primary focus is leading initiatives for first-time entrepreneurs, including projects related to Woo, which I co-founded back in 2007 (and left 10 years ago).

I'm typing this newsletter from New York, where I am attending a leadership offsite. One of the things that I love most about New York is all of the walking and thinking that I do here. As I walked around town today, it dawned on me that during my years building Woo, I truly felt connected to something much greater than myself or what we were building. We were one cog in a much bigger push to democratise publishing and commerce.

I've done many interesting and meaningful things in my life since, but there was a sense of connection and shared interest in that season of life that I have not yet replicated until now.

It's also interesting because so much of the world of open source shaped how I think as an entrepreneur and human. It was also something that I was initially quite reluctant to explore or accept. I remember Matt Mullenweg (my new boss) arriving on a boat (one of those startup'y, hackathon-something cruise ships) in Cape Town in 2010/11 and pinging me for a beer. The venue was subpar (way too loud, in my opinion), but our conversation influenced so much of what was to follow for me.

An African proverb says: "If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together."

I'm in the latter stage of this season of life. I have done the rebellion and independence. I've done the "buck the trend".

I suspect connection and our shared humanity matter more than we think or want to admit.

So much of capitalist society wants to rank us and differentiate us accordingly. But I suspect we all want to belong.

We might be living in the Matrix, but even when Neo was plugged out, he belonged to a crew.