Hello lovey humans,

Sometimes the second harvest begins with a referral to a heart surgeon. Ouch!

My friend, Moshe Adir has been in tech since before most people had email. He co-founded his business in 1998 in Cape Town, back when the internet was made of dial-up tones and CD-ROMs. Nearly three decades later, he's still designing digital experiences for every major brand in the online gaming industry. The man has stories.

But this isn’t about business longevity. This is about personal sustainability.

One-Bar Wake-Up Call

Moshe says that for the last ten years, his brain was running on one-bar signal. Everything is lagging. Enough signal to get through the day, but not enough to do what he knew he was capable of. He had that anxiety we've all experienced. He was successful by every external metric. But inside, things were foggy.

The part that'll sound familiar to a lot of you: nobody knew. Because Moshe is one of those people who shows up with positive energy. Everyone who works with him says he lights up a room. For years, that was who he really was. But, gradually, it became a performance. He became very good at pretending he was fine.

We talk about this a lot at Second Harvest. The gap between the public version and the private experience. How many of us are trying to hold up a performance that used to be effortless. Eventually you run out of borrowed energy.

The Surgeon’s Office

It escalated. Blood pressure issues that had been building for years turned into concerning dizziness, so his doctor referred him to a heart surgeon. Moshe sat in that office and heard the doctor tell him his heart wasn't working correctly and that he need a pacemaker. He was in his early fifties.

He and his wife walked out that day and made a decision: before surgery, they’d change everything. They would completely change their diet. No shortcuts, no half measures. Two months later, ten kilograms lighter, he walked back into that surgeon’s office. The doctor looked at him, looked at his charts, looked at him again. He wasn't the same person.

No Pacemaker. No Surgery. Just A Daily Decision.

That was the beginning. To date, Moshe has maintained his new protocol for over 500 days. The specifics matter less than the cascade: the arthritis in his hands disappeared and the knee pain from a replacement that never healed properly, has resolved. Blood pressure medication, gone. Statins, gone. His unmedicated numbers are better than when he was on everything.

The anxiety that had been his constant companion for decades simply vanished. The fog lifted. “One morning I woke up and the energy was just there. I wasn’t performing anymore. The clarity was authentic. I didn’t need to manufacture anything.”

The Cane, the Conference, and the Family Trip

People in Moshe’s industry remember seeing him at conferences with that cane. What they didn’t know was how much he dreaded those floors. Miles of walking, long days, calculating how much he could handle before he needed to sit down.

Then he walked into a conference without it. People he’d known for years stopped him to say they noticed. The movement, the energy, the fact that he was still standing at the end of the night.

But the moment that meant the most wasn’t professional. It was personal. Moshe’s family had a dream: take the kids to Italy for three weeks. Walk the cobbled streets and see everything. He kept putting it off because he was terrified he couldn’t physically keep up. That he’d let his family down.

Recently, they went. London and Italy for a month and never complained once about the constant walking. "That trip, meant more to me than almost anything in thirty years of business."

The Title That Fits

There’s another layer to Moshe’s story that we find fascinating. A few years ago, he fired himself as CEO of his business. Not because the company was failing, but because he finally admitted that the skills that made him a great founder made him a terrible CEO. His brother Ashley was already doing the leadership work anyway. Moshe was itching to get back to what he was actually good at: spotting opportunities, building relationships, and envisioning the future.

So he called his brother one evening and said the words that changed everything: “I think I’m the problem.”

That kind of self-awareness and the willingness to give up a title in order to do the work you were actually designed for is rare at any age. At 55, with decades of identity built around being the guy in charge, it’s an act of genuine courage. It's a recognition of where your energy actually belongs.

Why His Story Matters to Us

Moshe also calls this chapter of his life the second harvest. He has accumulated the usual stuff; wealth, a valuable network, deep technical experience but now, he sees that sustainability isn't about by doing more, but by doing the right things. As we learned from our friend Jon McNeill, prioritizing subtraction over addition can be the ultimate creative force.

We didn’t name our company after Moshe. But we might as well have. His story is a near-perfect embodiment of what we believe: that the accumulation of a lifetime is worth very little if you don’t have the clarity and energy to use it.

Moshe's kids are watching their dad show up with clarity and care for himself. His team are also changing their own habits — not because he told them to, but because they could see the change in him. In his own words, "All that experience, all those relationships, all that hard-won knowledge you've accumulated over your career is worth very little if you don't have the clarity and energy to leverage it."

You can follow Moshe's writing on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mosheadir​

More stories like this soon.

— Richard & Devon