Hey friend,
A good leader knows that the soil is what matters.
When you are a leader, it should be your primary job to focus on the soil and take care of it so your seeds can grow and consumers can focus on the fruit. The analogy is from Groundwork and here is how they break it down,
Soil: People and culture
Seeds: Ideas
Weeds: Conflict
Fruit: Product
That’s why it’s important to focus on culture and people — because when they’re healthy, they flourish with ideas and share them openly in a way that leads to great products.
But if culture is toxic and full of conflict, even the best people can’t produce good results or even the best ideas can’t be implemented in an effective way. Leaders will become reactive instead of proactive because they’re so focused on dealing with weeds that they forget about their soil.
Focusing on healthy culture would lead to a healthy soil and if we treat humans as a work in progress, we will nurture the soil.
I recently listened to a podcast called Creators on Air. I listened to an episode called Becoming known on writing online by Alice Lemee. She shared a pottery wheel analogy that truly resonated with me. She shared that initially you are going to slap everything at it and it’s going to be messy but as you build momentum, it’s going to start taking shape and finally turn into something you will love or probably hate lol. This is how I’m starting to view my journey as a Tech Content Creator.
Speaking of good podcasts, here are 3 of my favourites:
First, I’m extremely excited to see the Layouts RFC in Next.js moving forward. The amount of care being put into the API and its documentation is inspiring. It changes how we handle pages in Next.js - you can take a look at the tweet here to learn more.
Next up: Next.js also announced a virtual conference in October that promises to bring even more exciting changes. And I’m thrilled about what we’ll learn from them!
As always, if you have feedback or ideas for topics you’d like to see covered more often, please hit reply and share your thoughts! And don’t worry we will still be friends after.