Adii Pienaar

If I can spend 15 minutes removing an obstacle for my team and the rest of the team can cumulatively save an hour in happiness & subsequent productivity, then I'm winning, they're winning and WooThemes is winning.

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I thought that data would help us navigate a potentially slippery slope and we subsequently used data to pre-validate every potential decision we made. Much to our own detriment.

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Maybe we've lost focus on the things that are really important when building a business.

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I've had an interesting and - at times - challenging year. I've had to learn how to be the dad that I want to be. I've had to question the way I work, what I work on & what I'm really passionate about.

Beyond this, I was lured into the romanticism of angel investing (from which I learnt so many lessons, but that's for another post) and got (actively) involved in one of these startups that almost saw me leaving WooThemes. After I decided not to pursue that opportunity, I helped to oversee a massive scaling & growth effort at Woo in the second part of 2012.

The thing about many of my experiences & subsequent decisions this year, was that I had to go through those experiences to make the decisions. I guess this would come down to failing / making mistakes in an effort to learn in a "you have to break a few eggs to bake a cake"-way.

2012 has been a year of learning for me, partly because of the past mistakes that I've overseen. Today, I'm a better individual, man, husband, dad & entrepreneur as a result of that.

When I reflect on the past year though, I know in my heart that I could've avoided so many of the mistakes I had made. And I could've still had the benefit of the learning experience.

Just because I learnt something from a mistake, doesn't mean that, that was the only way to learn that lesson:

• Maybe I only had to make 1 or 2 angel investments (and not 5) to learn what I did?
• Had I addressed core issues in the way I think / work / live before I had a son of my own, I would've been the dad I wanted to be from day one?
• If we had followed "Scaling 101: The Best Practice to Scaling Any Company" at WooThemes, then maybe the last 6 months would not have been as challenging?

I don't know.

What I do know though is that failure is massively overrated today; especially in our current startup climate, where it's the norm to fail, pivot, fail & pivot again. My perception is that we've given failure such value on an entrepreneur's CV that it almost overshadows the minor victories & successes.

Are we saying that an entrepreneur that has failed & "learnt from his / her mistake" is better off than the entrepreneur that avoided making that mistake (albeit having a bit of luck)?

Similarly - failure is no precursor for future success. As an entrepreneur, just because I've multiple mistakes (and perhaps I'm battle-hardened as a result), I don't think I'm more (or less for that matter) likely to succeed in my next project or startup. Yes - I have a better point of reference due to past experience, which will help me avoid obvious pitfalls or at least spot stumbling blocks before they're critical. But this is no guarantee that I'll be successful, which means that past failure has very limited value (at the very least in terms of the potential reward thereof).

Learning from mistakes are easy, because they probably hurt us in some way. We got burnt and that literally drove the conclusion home.

"Only a fool runs into the same brickwall twice, expecting a different result."

But I've also learnt from all the right decisions & victories; I just haven't been as focused about them. I think I've always just taken the victories in my (slightly-arrogant) stride in a way of saying "well, that was expected".

The reality is that a reflection on those successes would've probably given me just as much experiential learning as that from failure.

So remind me why we're celebrating failure again?

Discuss this on Hacker News.

If you'd like to chat to me about this or get advice on something similar, feel free to give me a call.

We live in a time where we are always trying to work more, be more efficient, increase our productivity. We strive to do more, so we get involved in more projects & take on tasks & To Do's that aren't that important.

Heck, everyone has a side-project these days.

I guess we've become so used to diversification. "Don't put your eggs into one basket." says your investment manager. So instead of putting more money into AAPL (which has made you good money until now), you find lesser stocks just for the sake of diversification.

This works for financial investments, but not for investments of your time.

In the past 2 years, I've made this mistake twice.

First up, I decided that it would be a good idea to diversify my interest (both financial & personal / passion) in WooThemes by creating a new entity, Radiiate (R.I.P.). I wanted it to be an incubator for my other ideas and had a bit of spare cash to invest into that pursuit. I couldn't keep up though and the mental drain I experienced was just too great. I lost $250k instead.

Then, in the last couple of years at WooThemes, we've become really good at saying "Yes!" to new ideas / feature requests and generally just doing more. We justified it by saying that people wanted these things and we would be able to diversify our interests (I mean - things might just tank one day). This however created such a burden & financial overhead (supporting legacy products that never amounted to much), which has meant that it's taken quite a few months to cleanse ourselves of that baggage and the bad habits it installed.

The thing is that focus trumps most things in any given situation. We may think we're good at multi-tasking, but it will never be as efficient / productive / successful as it could be when you focus on doing just one thing. When you're clear about what you're working on & what you're working towards, it becomes exponentially simpler to execute on your vision & plan.

This mindset also has an interesting application within WooThemes: It's the nature of our business to have multiple products, so we won't ever just have the one product. But we have however changed our strategy to double-down on the products & revenue channels where we see most traction & growth. So instead of creating more, we're just doing more with what we already have.

Avoid the "Jack of all trades, Master of none."-mantra, as this not only defocuses & complicates your execution, but it most definitely decreases the quality of your work / products / services.

If you'd like to chat to me about this or get advice on something similar, feel free to give me a call.