Adii Pienaar

I'm an ambitious guy, which means that I'm currently working on a bunch of different projects (to name only a couple). And on top of this, I'm hiring a new Rails developer to help push it even more projects...

The thing is that there are some days - like today - when I feel as if it is absolutely impossible to be working on all these projects and I just crave the simplicity that comes from only working on one thing at a time. But no, I have this uncompromising ambition which means I want everything done yesterday and that instead of multi-tasking, I just multi-project.

This isn't intended to be some kind of emo tale of how I can't cope, how I can't find time for everything and how I'm not executing enough to be happy / successful. Nope, I'm incredibly happy with my life and I have many blessings which I'm incredibly grateful for.

But this uncompromising ambition has a few consequences though.

I have sacrificed most of my hobbies in life as a result of this ambition... I can't use the internet anymore, without checking my mail or checking in on sales / progress from my different ventures. I only read business- or web-related books and / or content, instead of just chilling out with a mindless novel. Heck, I can't even let my thoughts wander (and relax), without it veering to new ideas, optimizations or business experiments.

Is it a curse? Probably not. In fact, this ambition is probably a good thing, because it makes me work really hard. And deep-down I know that everything doesn't need to be finished yesterday, that I need to delegate & prioritize better and that I need to learn the skill of switching off properly.

It's just that some days - like today - it feels as if I'm completely standing still.

Conundrum indeed.

See the above image? Well, that was from an e-mail, which almost caused me to spend 4x the amount I had to spend to secure a domain that I would've liked (read: not needed).

Yesterday is I was watching the interest and buzz grow for Aboard Entrepreneurship, I realized that a year ago it would've been impossible for me to launch a project like this. This is obviously not an exact science (as I don't have actual evidence to prove this), but if I had launched this project last year, it would've been very optimistic indeed.

After successfully launching Aboard Entrepreneurship yesterday with 10 contributors, we've been blown away by the initial interest in the project. Hundreds of people have signed up to the mailing list and there's a bunch of awesome people who've reached out to us to contribute.

We're up to 16 awesome contributors now and I'd like to just introduce you to them (as the site currently can't hold all of them):

• Alexis Ohanian, ex-founder of Reddit and now works with both Hipmunk & Y Combinator. Alexis is also very much into social entrepreneurship, so this is a massive addition to the project and one we're incredibly excited about! :)
• Andrew Wilkinson, founder at MetaLab. Andrew's been involved in so many online web apps, that it would've been silly from us not ask him to contribute.
• Amy Hoy (Freckle) & Garrett Dimon (Sifter) are two awesome people I met in Vienna at SchnitzelConf last year.
• Lastly we're welcome two South African entrepreneurs, Christine Meintjes (KIKI) & Nic Haralambous (MoTribe), as we felt that it was important for us to highlight the entrepreneurial talent in our home country as well. :)

Expect a couple of updates like this in the next couple of days. :)

Who would you like to see joining Aboard Entrepreneurship?