🔥 Sacred Pace: In Community #114

Your weekly spark centering entrepreneurial leaders, creators, and culture-makers from the rising majority

In partnership with

FINAL CALL: What’s Your Creative Era?

The 18th Annual Shorty Awards - recognizing brands, agencies, non-profits, and creators - are open for entries, with 100+ categories reflecting the biggest shifts in digital creativity today.

Enter to gain global recognition, benchmark your work against top brands and agencies, and inspire your team with industry-leading validation.

Submit by March 6 and join brands like Google, Edelman, Barbie, YouTube, Snapchat, Verizon, and Weber Shanwick in claiming your era of creativity.

🔥 And now, for your weekly spark.

Optimize, iterate, accelerate — and still miss the people who matter.

Culture rarely moves at the speed of your content calendar. And community never does.

Community moves at the speed of trust — built slowly through consistency, proximity, and care. You can scale impressions overnight. You can’t scale trust.

And you can’t build healthy communities at an unhealthy pace. Burnout spreads socially. So does calm, clarity, and care.

Community isn’t just a growth strategy. It’s a health strategy.

As Ramadan begins this week, I’ve been reflecting: this month isn’t about visibility. It’s about intention, discipline, reflection, and moving with purpose.

It’s also about restoration — physical, emotional, spiritual. A reminder that depletion is not a badge of honor. That’s not just spiritual wisdom. It’s strategic wisdom.

For those leading brands, teams, and companies — especially when navigating rooms not built for us — speed can become performance.

But performance isn’t presence. Acceleration isn’t alignment.

The best marketers — and the best founders and leaders — I know aren’t always the fastest. They’re the most intentional.

📌 Sacred Pace in Practice

If gravity is about pull, sacred pace is about timing — and timing decides whether community deepens or disconnects.

Intention before execution
Ask: why does this deserve to exist? Not just “will it perform?” but “does it matter to the people we serve?”

We’ve all seen the brand that posts about a cultural holiday because it’s trending — and the one that’s shown up for that community all year.

The difference isn’t design. It’s intention. I’ve rushed things before because momentum felt urgent. The work moved fast. It didn’t always move deep.

Speed without intention creates noise. 

Discipline over impulse
Not every trend requires your participation. Not every cultural moment requires your brand voice.

Remember when every brand rushed into Threads? Or when every brand had something to say during a crisis? Or when every brand tried to sound like Duolingo?

Participation feels active. But activity isn’t always strategy.

Restraint builds credibility. And credibility is the foundation of community.
Impulse mirrors anxious leadership. Discipline reflects regulated leadership.

Depth before scale
If it doesn’t resonate with your core community, scaling it only amplifies disconnection. Relevance matters more than reach.

I’ve seen leaders pour budget into paid growth before their core audience even understands what they stand for. And before those same leaders understood the difference between an audience and community.

I’ve also felt the temptation to accelerate distribution before the foundation felt fully formed.

The result? Traffic without loyalty. Reach without resonance.

If it doesn’t resonate deeply with your core community, scaling it only amplifies disconnection.

Renewal as strategy
Ramadan is a season of renewal. We need that at work too. What are you choosing not to participate in? Vanity metrics? Beige work? Performative inclusion?

Communities need space to reset and return to what matters. Without renewal, teams burn out, audiences disengage, and culture becomes extractive.

How many teams are pushing Q1 campaigns while still carrying the fatigue of Q4??

How many leaders are operating in constant output mode without creating space for recalibration?

I’ve learned — at multiple times the hard way — that exhaustion shows up in the work before we admit it to ourselves.

Renewal isn’t indulgent. It’s structural.

Communities need space to reset. So do the people building them.

Sacred pace isn’t about slowing down forever. It’s about aligning so acceleration lands with force.

Speaking of alignment, I’ve been building the In Community YouTube channel as a slower, deeper space for conversation — not just clips, but context. We’re 38% of the way to 1,000 subscribers, and I’m working hard to get there soon.

If this newsletter added value to your thinking — about culture, leadership, or your path — I’d appreciate you subscribing. Not to inflate numbers. To strengthen the center of this community. Subscribe here 🎥

Because scale without depth is just noise.

There’s pressure right now — especially in our industry — to prove relevance. To show momentum. To demonstrate output.

But leaders who last understand something different: Relevance earned slowly is harder to take away. Trust built intentionally is harder to disrupt. Community cultivated patiently is harder to fracture.

Sacred pace is how community becomes durable. It’s how trust survives trend cycles. It’s how movements outlast moments. And how the people building them stay whole.

If this resonates, I shared some do’s and don’ts, along with reflections on Ramadan and intention here. Because sometimes the most strategic move you can make is to move with intention.

✅ Now Hiring

What you asked for, delivered.

Is someone you know considering what’s next for them? Here are a few roles with people hiring across the network. I’ll be adding roles here every week, so stay tuned and make sure to spread the word.

ICYMI last week:

And before you go, consider who else might value this newsletter and what’s coming up on YouTube. Make sure to fwd this newsletter onward to them too. They can subscribe here for more directly in their inbox. 🔁 

In community,

Fahad