You have a version of yourself you keep putting off. Not because you don’t know what it takes. You know exactly what it takes. You’ve read the books, watched the videos, made the plan on a Sunday night with real conviction. And then Monday shows up, and so does the thing you actually worship. Comfort. Not drugs. Not money. Not fame. Comfort. The soft, reasonable,…
The things you do when nobody would blame you — those are the things that define you. I spend more time trying not to f*ck things up than I do anything else. That’s not a complaint. That’s just the job when you lead people you actually trust. And lately, one of my personal rules got tested hard. I held the line. But it wasn’t easy,…
Someone asked me yesterday what I’ve been up to. Not in a checking-in way. In the normal, conversational way people ask that question. What’s new? What have you been working on? I didn’t have an answer. Not a real one. Not one that felt truthful. It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing. It’s that I’ve been doing everything. Today alone — and it’s not even…
First, the backstory… I was in a bad mood before it even started. A get-together with a handful of information security veterans. People I respect. People who’ve been in this industry for decades. And within the first ten minutes, we were doing one of the things I hate most about this industry — posturing. Trading stories about how important we are. Who we’ve advised. What…
Mental Health Awareness Month – Entry #8 IMPORTANT NOTE: I am NOT a mental health professional. I’m just a person who loves you and has been through some things myself. If you need professional help, please start here. This is the last Mental Health Awareness Month post. And it’s the one I’ve been most careful about writing. Everything else this month — the shame, the…
Mental Health Awareness Month – Entry #7 IMPORTANT NOTE: I am NOT a mental health professional. I’m just a person who loves you and has been through some things myself. If you need professional help, please start here. Let’s say you’ve done the hard part. Let’s say you’ve had the honest conversation we talked about last week. You’ve admitted — to yourself and to someone…
“Happy Memorial Day” is wrong. Not rude. Not technically illegal. Just — wrong. And the fact that most people don’t even pause before saying it tells you something important about where we are as a culture. I grew up on Marine Corps bases. Only child of two U.S. Marines. I didn’t learn about Memorial Day from a teacher or a TV commercial or a mattress…
Mental Health Awareness Month – Entry #6 IMPORTANT NOTE: I am NOT a mental health professional. I’m just a person who loves you and has been through some things myself. If you need professional help, please start here. I’ve been building up to this one all month. Not because it’s the most complicated post to write — it’s actually the simplest. No frameworks, no clinical…
Mental Health Awareness Month – Entry #5 IMPORTANT NOTE: I am NOT a mental health professional. I’m just a person who loves you and has been through some things myself. If you need professional help, please start here. When most people picture depression, they picture sadness. They picture someone who can’t get out of bed. Someone staring out a rain-streaked window. Someone crying for no…
Bad things happen to you. They happen to me too. They happen to everyone — the leader, the follower, the CISO with a $50M budget and the analyst grinding through alerts at 2 AM. Loss, betrayal, bad luck, unfair systems, people who lied to you, people who left you holding the bag. Real things. Things that hurt. None of that is the problem. The problem…