Adii Rockstar

In recent months – especially since the beginning of the year – I’ve found that the more I align my passions & the things that generally makes me happy in my life, the more I tend to be productive, inspired, motivated & just content. Now this probably seems obvious & trivial, but I’ve learned (about myself at least) that there’s a little bit of a different angle to this if you look closely.

Before I get into it, I need to mention that a lot of this thinking and the tweaking & tinkering in my life is a result of the idealistic goals that I’ve set myself for this year. So on a regular basis, I’ve been referring back to those goals and making sure that I’m making appropriate progress in achieving my aims.

One of the changes that I wanted to implement in my life, was a healthier & more active lifestyle, which means beyond changing to a healthier diet, I’m also training to run a half marathon in April. On most days I would thus go for a 5 – 8km run in the afternoon in preparation for the race. But to get back to how this influences my overall “life happiness” (beyond the obvious result of feeling healthier & more fit than I have ever felt), I now go running for two possible reasons: (more…)

I’ve been looking at my life in the wrong way.

Everything I’ve been aiming to implement in terms of my workflow, productivity, emotional well-being, happiness, ambition etc. have been within the average context of the rest of the world.

Why haven’t I gone about this in a more unique way? Simple: it ain’t that easy.

I have however decided that whilst I may not know exactly how to go about this “revolution” in my life, I won’t settle for this constant feeling of unrest & uncertainty. Having also had a generally awesome January thus far (and I’ve been dedicated in hitting most of my goals for 2010), I can’t bash my existing day-to-day life too much, but there is nothing that is not optimized just yet; something that is not quite Adii.

I think I’m past the fact that I need to steer clear of the online world every now and again, need to exercise more and all the other “become a happier you”-stuff (I’m already doing pretty well in achieving all of these). The inherent problem with all of these theories are that they were conceptualized to be generic and once again: average with the context of the rest of the world. On a certain level, this doesn’t relate to personal happiness and instead it just perpetuates this rat-race towards achieving a personal zen of sorts (which is contradictory, since most of the measures should take you away from the rat-race).

Revolution is on its way. In one form or another (TBA).

Last week I was able to write a really long piece on being prepared to work hard. For my 3rd Project 52 post, I’d like to expand my thoughts on the matter of hard work and would like to explain why I don’t necessarily that I’m “working” in the average sense of the word.

We’ve all heard the mantra “When you love your job, you’ll never work again.” and whilst there is incredible truth in that, I don’t think that it fully captures why it is seemingly true. If I could elaborate on that concept (my interpretation thereof), I’d like to believe that you’ll never feel as if you’re really “working” when the following is in place:

• Passion. It all starts with the passion you have for your job and the industry + marketplace + economy that it falls into. Without an almost addictive passion for your job, you will never be able to sustain your happiness or ambition in one job in the longer term.
• Love. For me, the love comes after the passion and the love should be for your actual work. In this sense the work is the actual stuff / tasks that you need to take care of on a daily, weekly & monthly basis, whilst your job is more of a holistic, “catch-all” description of what you do.
• Environment. There’s nothing like hating your job, because everything about it feels like a sucky, 9 – 5 corporate job. Having a workspace which allows you to exercise the above mentioned passion & love, will really take away all of the nitty-gritty involved with doing your job, as the crap stuff associated with it is kinda hidden behind a layer of awesomeness & tranquility around you.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting alone in our offices on a Saturday morning and I really couldn’t be happier.** Nothing I’ve done this morning has felt like work, as I feel so inspired about everything that is happening in & around WooThemes, Radiiate & The Rockstar Foundation that it’s easy to get lost in my passion, love & the environment in which those two things really catch fire.

If you can’t write a blog post like this about your job, you seriously need to consider changing it. I believe everybody deserves the right to love their job and I also believe that the real value for employers is having employees that truly love what they do. (more…)

I constantly get this feeling that other people tend to think that what I have achieved has been a fluke of some kind and that I have thus been extremely lucky to have gotten as far as I have until now. This is even evident in my own dad’s opinion that I have been extremely blessed and that I should feel very privileged to have these blessings.

In short, I realize that I’ve been very blessed until now and I could seriously not have scripted the growth in my own reputation & following and that of WooThemes (which seems to go hand-in-hand with my own & vice-versa) any more beneficial to myself. I also know (and believe) that the lucky aspect of some people’s opinions are only true if you consider that I was at the right place, at the right time AND I had the guts to pursue my ideas within that opportunity at all costs. So whilst there is an obvious element of “luck” or being blessed, I will never discount my own contributions in pursuing my dreams & ambitions.

The Hard Work

I’m a firm believer in hard work and I can remember my dad telling (when I quit my corporate job to pursue & grow WooThemes) that “there would be no harder boss, than the boss you’ll be to yourself” and I didn’t really understand what he meant. Almost two years down the line now, I can say that I’ve experienced day-in & day-out what he meant with that.

When you work for yourself, you’re on your own and you take responsibility for your own career, income & life. There’s no one that’s gonna give you a pay cheque at the end of the month, if you were a lazy during that month. But this bit of freelancing or being a business owner has been publicized many times over already and I’d prefer to focus on another angle: working hard, because you want to. (more…)

For the last two and a half weeks, I’ve had basically no access to either my Macbook Pro or the interwebs, which meant that the only way I could collect some of my thoughts & ideas was with old-school pen & paper. Fortunately though, my new fetish is my Field Notes notebooks, which meant that I actually did quite a bit of writing during my time offline.

The one thing that I spent quite a bit of time on, was the goals that I wanted to achieve and the ideas that I wanted to pursue this year. But instead of just jotting down a list of things to do in 2010, I spent a little more time to figure out my reasoning behind all of those goals. This meant identifying the spheres of my life where I needed to set goals, and more importantly – why I needed or wanted to set myself those goals.

After spending a few hours figuring out the “why’s”, then jotting down some goals and then working back again to delve into the “why’s”; I realized that there was an ever-present hint of idealism within my writing & thought processes. This was evident within the slight vagueness of my goals (in the past I’d set easily measurable goals to “track my progress” instead), and perhaps also the seemingly supernatural powers it would take to achieve some of those. (more…)