There is a satisfying kind of tiredness that comes from genuine labor; it’s the kind earned by decades of showing up, building something with your mind, your hands and your judgment, and persisting through the tough stretches. Labor Day was created to honor exactly that. This year, it arrived for me at a memorable moment, one where I’m no longer in the “labor force” per se but still actively working on what comes next.
For most of my working life, the labor involved strategic thought and operational leadership. Early on, farming taught me what viable growth actually requires. Agricultural marketing taught me how to honestly present what we’d grown to worldwide markets. And for the better part of three decades, commercial landscaping taught me how to participate in building something worthwhile at scale, most recently a business that has become the sixth-largest commercial landscape company in America. That is the kind of work Labor Day was made for: unglamorous, demanding, important and yet only fully visible in hindsight as something larger than it felt at the time.
Some months ago, I handed off my operational leadership role. Not the relationships. I remain close to HeartLand and the leaders with whom I’ve worked over the last decade. What I set down was the daily weight of leading the operation. At the time of the transition, I did not realize how much room for forward thinking that would create. The labor of preparing and planting the ground had to finish, in a sense, before the cultivation could really begin.
That key word — cultivation — has quietly been the throughline of my writing since 2012, though I didn’t see it that clearly until recently. This post marks the 500th I’ve written under that name. Five hundred posts, written in stolen hours across a working life, turned out to contain a book I didn’t know I was writing until I went back and reviewed them as a body of work. That book, The Cultivated Leader, is now finished, and its arrival is part of this moment.
My personal website at billdellecker.com has just been rebuilt from the ground up. It has served as the home of my Cultivation(s) blog for as long as I’ve been writing it. Four years ago, when Leadership Worthy launched, we bolted a page onto it for that book; it was functional, but the site never really worked as a cohesive thing. Now, for the first time, both books and everything I’ve written live together here as they should. Tanner Chadd (digital wizard at HeartLand) did that work, and did it with real care for what this platform needed to become now.
The transition, the 500th post, and the new site are really the same turn, experienced three ways. The labor that built a rewarding career has made room for a different kind of work: no longer about running the operation but instead about sharing learnings for growing a high-impact life. It’s about preparing fertile ground for new planting and cultivating what grows from it, creating the potential for future harvests.
I invite you to explore the new site when you have a moment, and also to stay tuned for the upcoming launch of The Cultivated Leader.
Tempus Maximize!
