Excalicauldron: Newborn Lambs Before the Dawn of Spring - Issue #14
What feeds you sustains you, and other gifts of focused choice
A moment in time and building in public.
Still Life: Sunday Portrait
Sitting in a little apartment, not quite ground floor because the entrance to the structure is elevated. On my right, outside the balcony, are patches of green grass rebelling against the tyranny of the yearly season of the dead. The fence between one terraced grass bed and another is camouflaged green, creating the illusion of a slightly bigger micro vastness.
The trees are unashamedly barren, silhouetting the baby blue sky. White whiskers on either side of the tree against my horizon are illuminated by the glimmering scouts of a much brighter ball of fire hiding behind a large chalky gatekeeper above my line of sight.
I'm chasing the morning dragon as its flight path makes its way across my floor. The round table is typical 90s-style imitation oak-plywood, and I've dragged it - and my chair with it, to the crown stand in the open-plan kitchen. As a woman, I belong in this kitchen because that's where the electric socket is so I can charge my laptop.
In the background plays the sounds of a Norwegian musician - only 63,512 followers on Spotify, only two albums back in 2013?! - caressing melodiously an acoustic guitar and cello.
New city, new month, new life.
I track the passing of time not by date but by place. And I think this is going to be my favourite month so far this year. And the best new update of me. (I really ought to write a thought piece on how Life™ is best lived when you have the mentality of a perpetual (agile) startup.)
2023 Ain’t in Kansas
Remember when I said I’m always playing peekaboo? (Excalicauldron: Ignore the World - Issue #11): "...my capacity for public openness (especially the expectation of regularity with which society's imbued any kind of output) is always in ebb and flow.")
Well, now you see me 😅
As I read back over my recap of 2022 (Excalicauldron: The Space Between Dying and Resurrection (& Big News Once Again) - Issue #13), I notice the absence of talking publicly about what I was building.
Since giving birth to AdLunam in September 2021 with my co-founders Jason Fernandes and Lawrence Hutson, after months of being in stealth mode, the company has become my second child. I used to have only one child, now I’m mother to two.
And just like parenting homo sapiens ain’t easy, so too are raising startups not for sissies. So there’s been so incredibly many highs (some of the earliest of which are chronicled in Excalicauldron: Through the Looking Glass - Issue #2) and abysmal lows.
Being a founder challenges you to your core, just like parenting does, for you see yourself mirrored back to you in the reflection of a separate entity, in the best and worst of ways.
But 2022 wasn’t a year where I had the capacity to share myself with others publicly, at scale, the way I sometimes do.
One year ago, I wrote in Excalicauldron: And on the 7th Day, She Took Pause and Bid a Momentary Farewell - Issue #7 about having this newsletter: “It's not meant to funnel anything anywhere. Instead, it serves a limited containment function. A snapshot of myself in a particular space and time, which I - for the seventh time, this issue - float out into the wide expanse of space, ceasing to keep track of it as soon as I press publish.”
So what I did share throughout the course of the year were things that needed to be suspended - publicly - in a particular space and time. However, this was largely for the purpose of creating for myself an easy reference point between the different peaks I climbed.
Such as being able to hyperlink now to a very important inner archaeology that took place in tandem with a relationship that was as transformative as it was significant: Excalicauldron: Crying is Taking a Shower on the Inside - Issue #12. Or how I came to hyper-focus my life in 2022 on wellness, family, and career in an every-flowing dance with mindful productivity: Excalicauldron: Recalibration - Issue #8.
Building in Public
This year, there’s a LOT of sharing going on.
On LinkedIn, I’m actively share my process of writing Web3 Explained on (literally) a daily basis. On Facebook, I’ve committed myself to a daily reflective gratitude practice to capture moments of (typically travel) growth.
Since I keep my Facebook rather private, I might start sharing to Instagram (since it’s hard keeping in touch with new friends you meet on the road without Instagram) only a visual representation.
With Web3 Explained, I’ll end the year with a book ready to publish (what I’m doing was featured in International Business Times and The South African, a nice little homage from back home that I just love!)
And in just 12 days, part of my life story will be featured in a book anthology entitled Digital Nomad Moms, where I talk about how I built my life from a first-year university student, pregnant at 19, to a worldschooling nomad founder of an award-winning startup.
So this will be a year of a lot of sharing in public. Whether that includes this newsletter remains to be seen, but after a long hiatus I’m once again all over the internet (thankfully not nearly as much as I was when I was still in marketing, THAT was intense!) and that’s proving to be one ongoing mindfulness practice (or the lack thereof).
You can likely expect to read more about that 😅
Algorithms
“Part of the problem of social media is that there is no equivalent to the scientific glassblowers’ sign, or the woodworker’s open door, or Dafna and Jesse’s sandwich boards. On the internet, if you stop speaking: you disappear. And, by corollary: on the internet, you only notice the people who are speaking nonstop.”
Author Robin Sloan
The above quote - via Personal Knowledge Management OG Andy Matuschak - addresses another nuance to the conversation about building in public.
I shared on LinkedIn yesterday my thoughts on what social media is doing to creators.
By my definition, creators are those people we consciously want to see content from on social media.
Choosing to interact with social media this year - and so much of it! - is a significant choice, seeing that I have a long-standing history of going without, as told to Excalicauldron: Origins - Issue #1.
My reasons for doing it is very different from someone who’s building their brand in order to kickstart or elevate their business. In other words, I’m not doing this hoping to make my dreams come true. I’ve been doing that for years, and in so many ways I’m already living my dreams. Where I’m not yet in alignment, I’m growing into it.
Which is why I’ll be hyperfocusing a lot more this coming year on broken models within social media and how we can get back to connecting to each other by choice rather than rely on the mercy of the algorithms.
See ya when I see ya! Keep well, my friends 💓
xNadjax