Adii Pienaar
Entrepreneur & 3X Founder (Cogsy, Conversio and WooCommerce). Author of "Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success". Ex-Rockstar.| Adii Pienaar
Entrepreneur & 3X Founder (Cogsy, Conversio and WooCommerce). Author of "Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success". Ex-Rockstar.| Adii Pienaar
I've sometimes leapt from an ending straight into a beginning. Occasionally, the momentum carried me somewhere beautiful. Other times, I should've paused, taken a breath, sat in the in-between for a while longer. So when I tell you that I've just wrapped up my time at Automattic… and I'm already| Adii Pienaar
What if self-actualisation wasn’t the summit? That question has been echoing in my mind since I first encountered the Blackfoot Nation’s worldview—a wisdom tradition that quietly, radically, reframes the ladder so many of us have been climbing. Four years ago, I published Life Profitability| Adii Pienaar
(in honour of the original post) There’s a particular kind of ache that stirs when life goes quiet. Not loud or sharp. Just… persistent. It hums beneath the noise of goals, tasks, ambitions. And when the striving pauses, there it is—restlessness, craving, a pull toward| Adii Pienaar
Lately, I’ve been sitting with a quiet discomfort—this lingering sense that when I write with AI, I’m somehow cheating the craft. Like I’m skipping the part where the writer wrestles the words into place, alone, in the dark. That’s the| Adii Pienaar
There’s a haunting paradox in the air. We are the most connected generation in human history—pixels pulsing with our presence, borders blurred by cheap flights and broadband. And yet, we appear further apart than ever. Nations turning inward. Communities pulling back. Individuals fortifying their identities like castles under| Adii Pienaar
This is something I hope my kids learn from me. Maybe they do so with a combination of this writing and the example I set. Maybe there are just enough breadcrumbs between my words and actions that they at least ponder this often. The balance is living in the future,| Adii Pienaar
I’ve heard Dave Hause explain that Damn Personal is a song he wrote about a dear friend. Whenever I listen to it, though, I hear the words as if I’m singing and saying it to myself. It never fails to strike a chord. In acknowledging my| Adii Pienaar
I’ve been traveling in the last week, and on a recent late-night walk around the city, I found myself (yet again) making plans. Always thinking, ideating and being ambitious. This wasn’t new or alien to me. I’ve defaulted to this natural state and motion for as long| Adii Pienaar
Years ago, I read Eliot Peper's Breach, and I have always thought that these two passages from the book beautifully make a case for authenticity: “Instead of trying to cover up the damage, the repair is illuminated, the imperfections transformed into a source of beauty. I’| Adii Pienaar
There is this beautifully striking passage from Ruha Benjamin in a recent podcast with Trevor Noah: “I think part of it is that I don’t identify strongly with this very uptight, insulated sort of ideal of what it means to be an academic or professor. I have| Adii Pienaar
I was writing my second post for the day just now. For a split second when I was done, I considered not publishing it today and instead schedule it for tomorrow. (Or worse, just keep it in the backlog for a rainy day.) Somewhere along the way, I had internalised| Adii Pienaar
This is a follow-up on the original Being Free. Having gotten into a bit of a groove of writing (and publishing!) here regularly, I've overlooked one of the things that used to trip me up so often when I was writing to achieve a goal. Picking a good| Adii Pienaar
This is one of those perspectives that I suspect I can exclusively have in hindsight and this season of my life. At any other point in my journey, I prioritised other things to the extent that I neglected even considering this perspective. Therein probably lies some of the sentiment I| Adii Pienaar
A big part of our world today is about making others believe what you believe. Capitalism thrives on sales and marketing, which are both a function of great storytelling. Becoming really good at this is a predictable way to make progress and accumulate wealth. An obvious and linear rationale would| Adii Pienaar
Money can buy many things. Often on the road to making more money, we buy more and/or more expensive things. And we agree that the smarter is often to save or reinvest that money into something that can make even more money. Capitalism is beautiful in that way; it| Adii Pienaar
Relationships suffer, burn-out looms large, and your business becomes unsustainable when work first and life later is your modus operandi for too long. Likewise, others in your entrepreneurial circle can suffer the same fate.| Adii Pienaar
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| 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,| Adii Pienaar
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| Adii Pienaar
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| Adii Pienaar
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| Adii Pienaar
I have excitedly been working on a mammoth new content project in the last couple of weeks. As I write this, the project already has nearly 100,000 words written, which is rather significant given that Life Profitability just breached 60,000 words. (There is something to be said about| Adii Pienaar
Anxiety, irritability, and depression are all side-effects of a common malady to entrepreneurs everywhere known as burnout. When this happens, pay attention.| Adii Pienaar
How do you define success? As an entrepreneur, your inclination may be to refer to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and say something like, “As long as we’re growing, we’re good.” But, when is good enough...enough?| Adii Pienaar
