Adii Pienaar

I used to be a firm believer of this mantra:

"When you love your job, you'll never work again."

Today, I'm not convinced that I believe it as much any more.

See, in terms of that mantra I guess I'd be considered to be living the dream. I co-founded my own business, get to work with an awesome team on awesome products, we make good money, I get to travel often and I have loads of flexibility. It's a privileged life.

And all of this has been fuelled by my passion for business, my passion to create, my passion for a challenge, my passion to start something.

When I created the very first WooThemes product 5 years ago, I did so because I was passionate about getting my hands dirty & creating. It was only ever intended to be a nice side-project that generated a bit of passive income. Instead it took off like a house on fire and evolved into the global business it is today.

Throughout the last 5 years, I've seen myself working more and sacrificing so many other aspects of my life (something which I've tried to change recently). I had to feed the beast that I had created.

I realized that the thing about success is that it demands more success. So whilst I've been passionate about building WooThemes every step of the day, it's become much more of a job than a passion or hobby over the years. That in itself isn't a bad thing, but the beast has demanded his pound of flesh from me.

I've found that mixing my ambition & drive with my obvious passion for certain things, I will always work more. And I haven't been able to control that well. Beyond the sacrifices that I've made and those that I've forced down on the people closest to me, it's also been a struggling maintaining that passion at all times.

I've come to realize that passion is a beast that needs to be fed. Sometimes it's gonna feel like you're making a deal with the devil and other times it's gonna feel like nurturing the most amazing Bonsai.

Regardless, you'll like be working quite a bit more as a result.

Today marks a new beginning and a very special time in my wife & my (but especially my wife's) life: Jeanne officially started trading in her new business (a bricks & mortar retail + services store) today.

In the last 2 years, I've witnessed Jeanne marrying me & becoming the best wife any husband could ask for. She quit her corporate job at a law firm and established her own boutique legal agency to much success. Then she put that on the backburner to take care of our new-born son, adapting to her new role as "best mom in the world" seamlessly.

So with Adii Jr growing up nicely, Jeanne started looking at business opportunities a couple of months ago (deciding on a new avenue and not returning to her legal roots). It took quite some time for the right opportunity to pop up and I witnessed my wife frustrated with the search & waiting at times, but she continued to amaze me with her patience, perseverance, ambition & drive.

Today I'm proud to call my wife a true entrepreneur & business owner. I've watched her evolve her business skills & knowledge in the last 2 years and I'm constantly surprised by her perspective within any discussion about business.

It's just been such a fun, rewarding & intimate experience being on this journey with Jeanne in the past 2 years. And on top of that, I'm incredibly excited to see how this new chapter develops.

I've been feeling incredibly blessed of late and feel that - as an entrepreneur and business owner - I have quite a few privileges. If I made a list of those today, these would be the recent highlights:

• I get to hack my life, make my own rules and make things better.

• Earlier this month I was in Boston for Business of Software and I got up at 6am to go for a run in the hotel gym. It was still dark out, but as I was running on the treadmill and looking out on a new, unexplored city, I just felt incredibly honoured to have the opportunity to get invited to speak at conferences like BoS and travel the world for my business.

• We've had the whole WooThemes team (up to 26 now) in Cape Town the last couple of days and it's been amazing to spend time with my "work family". I'm privileged to be a senior member of that family and to be the "provider" (in a way), which helps my family pay their bills and fund their lives.

I keep reminding myself of this, especially in times when I feel down and I feel like it's not all that it's cut out to be running a business. These privileges however underline the motivation for getting into business in the first place.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how our ideals & idols are totally broken and that we needed to re-evaluate how we work on & within online / digital / technology companies.

So I was quite sad to see another idol admitting that same brokenness. [1]

I'm trying to figure out when & why it became so acceptable for us to:

• Leave the office at 7pm AND then go home to work some more.
• Not take any kind of non-working holiday.
• Working every single weekend.
• Compromise on every, single aspect of our lives in favour of work.

The thing is that this has really become the norm within our industry, so whenever a new entrepreneur or startup employee want to figure out how they're supposed to succeed, we tell them to "Hustle!". We direct them at the most prominent & experienced bloggers within our space, who will perpetuate this "work/life balance isn't really important; you just need to work really hard" BS.

Even though I've seen more & more entrepreneurs speaking out against this recently, their voices are literally being drowned out by the mad-hustling-rush of the crowd.

Be the change you want to see in the world

Cliché I know, but I figured that I needed to change first before I could speak up about this. In the past 2 months I've found a drastic improvement within my own life due to various changes that I've made. And I'm so much happier because of it.

Here's some of the changes that I've made: [2]

• I removed e-mail from my iPhone. Completely. I'm not even logged into my Gmail / Google accounts, so can't just fire up Safari and read mail. This has greatly reduced my "dependency" to be connected and I've managed to mentally shut off from work so much easier. (h/t Harj Taggar)
• I try be at the office at 7am and then I make sure I'm home at around 4pm. Once home, I don't touch my computer at all for anything. Even "I quickly want to check tomorrow's weather" turned into quickly checking in on work. So I removed the temptation completely.
• I try not to touch work at all on weekends, meaning I don't even discuss ideas / challenges / plans with my wife on weekends.
• I've forced myself to delegate more tasks to team members and not take responsibility for things that I don't have to be responsible for. As CEO this is hard, as these things ultimately come back to me, but I'm trying to trust my team more.
• Most things aren't important and I don't need to spend time (physical or mental) dealing with those things now. This mantra applies especially to e-mail.
• When I spend time with my wife or son, I just spend time with them. I fully immerse myself in that moment and I try being the best husband or dad that I can be within that moment. This challenge has become a "game" to me and appeals to my ambitious nature, which has given me an alternative outlet (for that ambition) instead of relying on my work for that fulfillment.
• I exercise more, I take Magnesium supplements to sleep better and I take vitamin supplements to keep me energized during the day.
• I've picked up film photography as a hobby and ultimately a positive distraction from work.

These may not work for everyone, but I could recommend that you try only one thing, it would be to remove e-mail from your mobile devices; it's so easy to do, but has such a big impact in effecting a change in your life.

I also wholeheartedly agree with Micah Baldwin that things don't need to be in balance to be in balance. Balance is whatever makes you happy at any given time.

Ultimately it's not even about making any changes, but at the very least re-evaluating why & how you are living your life. This "more, better, quicker"-mindset is becoming old and it's become very evident that it's not sustainable for any kind of long-term period.

We can create & breed better life habits. To get there though, we need to question everything & re-learn what we thought we knew about working, living and finding a happy balance.

[1] I've never met Rand personally and would love to do so one day. The post and link wasn't meant to call him out in any way and instead I applaud him for wanting to make a change & being open / transparent about that.

[2] I've not perfected all of these, but I've already experienced a significant change in my life.

On 1 October we did something spectacular and totally unheard of (at least in terms of our own history) at WooThemes: we launched a complete overhaul & redesign of WooThemes.com in only 2.5 months. We re-did absolutely everything: redesigned every single page, stripped out our backend, replaced with a new system and migrated all of our old data across.

And oh my [insert expletives here], has it been the most painful experience since... We've had to fix so many bugs that were out in the public domain and our support channels have been over-run. It's really been bad.

Ask me whether I will do that again and I will say "Yes!" with the kind of gusto and confidence that belies the challenges we've faced since 1 October. That "Yes!" is entrenched in my opinion that you need to feel the pain, because that pain becomes the incentive to put a band-aid on it and stop the bleeding.

The fact is that this has been a major improvement for us as a team. The previous time we embarked on such an adventure, it took us 18 months to get to the point where we could publicly launch this thing. 18 to 2.5 months means a 720% improvement. :)

During the project, the decision to set a fixed launch date / deadline (for 1 October) and now in hindsight, I'm reminded by Reid Hoffman's famous quote:

"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

I'm also reminded by Matt Mullenweg's experience (from "1.0 is the Loneliest Number" of how that "one more thing"-mentality totally derailed WordPress' progress in 2006, which felt like exactly the problem we had when we previously overhauled our website.

It's not been pretty and it's not been great for our customers (which IMO is the only downside to this). But it's been one massive learning curve and - as a team - we've never been so agile in iterating, fixing things and making everything better.

I'm so enamoured with the positives from this experience, that my mind wants to make me believe that there is no other way to go about this: launch early, be embarrassed, feel the pain and then put a Band-Aid on it. Simple.

On the other hand, this post might just be the result of the endorphines I'm feeling from an obviously painful 3 weeks...