One way to make sure your garden looks great is to show up the day after everything has been planted.

Of course, a day old garden isn’t really a garden and the act of planting doesn’t make you a gardener.

I know being a gardner takes more than planting, because I can plant. I did it last weekend: I sweated and shoveled and endend up with a sweet looking patch of horticultural awesomeness. But I’m no gardner. Check back in a year or three. Let my garden weather a dozen seasons, then you’ll be able to tell if I’m a gardner or not.

Gardners don’t just plant, they also Nurture. Grow. Steward. Keep.

Planters take someone else’s work, move a little dirt, and soak up all the credit. Then they repeat cause they can’t do the real work.

Leadership that experiences high turn over in the garden of their influence isn’t impressive. It lacks roots. There’s no depth. Everything above the soil looks great, but there’s no strength underneath–where it counts.

For the planter, there will always be nurseries filled with new plants. However, the garden of the planter is filled with plants who hate being there.

Sure, some plants just won’t survive and they need to be replaced. My point is found in the pattern: as a leader, are you more of a planter or a gardner?

When nearly everything is new, I think there’s a real problem: a lack of commitment to patient endurance.

Should we go one step further?

What is true of leaders and their leadership is usually true of their friendships. We can do the same thing with our personal relationships: someone gets too close, or too much maintenance, we remove them from our lives and plant new ones.