“People suck” and the weakest link myth

Happy Sunday Friends!

Here’s one quote I’m musing on this week, two ideas, three favorites, and one question to take with you into the week ahead.

One Quote I’m Musing

“Human beings are our proper occupation”
| Marcus Aurelius

📝 “People suck” and the weakest link myth

I’ve heard some version of this sentence in almost every space I walk into:

“People suck. They are the weakest link.”

You have heard it.
You might have said it.
I have.

The frustration feels justified.

You build the system.
You write the policy.
You send the warning.

And someone still finds a way to ignore it or break it in a way you did not anticipate.

Here is the uncomfortable truth.

If you believe “people suck,” you will lead like they are disposable.
If you believe “people are the reason,” you will lead very differently.

🔍 Personal Story: A thumb drive in Iraq

Back in 2009, I was in the operations center at Radwaniyah Palace, Iraq. It was two or three in the morning. The ops center was lit by screens and fluorescent lights, multiple dashboards up on the screens, everyone running on caffeine and momentum.

We were in the middle of an incident that, on the surface, fit the meme perfectly.

Someone had used a thumb drive they had on a system they should not have.
An attacker now had a foothold they should never have had.
We were burning time and attention on a problem that “should not have happened.”

In the first brief, the energy in the room tilted toward blame.

Why were they so careless.
They knew not to do this.
People are the weakest link.

It would have been easy to stop there. Call it “user error,” throw more training at the problem, move on.

But when we pulled the thread, the story had nuance.

• The guidance about removable media was buried in a single slide, in a brief no one remembered.

• The system made it easy to plug in a drive and almost impossible to do the right thing without slowing down the mission.

• The person who did it was under pressure to move data quickly and keep things flowing.

• The incentives preferred speed and responsiveness, not caution and discipline.

The thumb drive was not the failure.
The culture was.

Marcus Aurelius would remind me. When someone does wrong, remember when you have done wrong too.

I’ve rushed before.
I’ve cut corners before.
I’ve chosen speed over procedure before.

The question shifted from “Why are people like this” to “Why did we design the environment this way.”

That is a very different kind of leadership.

🪞The Mirror: You, me, and everyone we lead

I see the same pattern across teams and organizations.

• The senior engineer who complains that juniors “do not care,” but never explains tradeoffs in plain language.

• The security leader who says “they just will not listen,” but presents risk as a wall of acronyms.

• The tech lead who resents product for “always cutting corners,” but never sits with them to understand their drivers.

They are not really asking for advice in those moments.
They are seeking permission to keep blaming everyone else.

A simple reminder I come back to:

Every time you point a finger, look at your hand. Three fingers are pointing right back at you. Rarely is an incident, an issue, a problem, one hundred percent on a single individual. There is almost always context, policy, culture, and leadership wrapped around it.

If we are honest, we have been party to the genesis of the problem we are now angry about.

Here is the hard mirror I have had to hold up for myself.

Every time I catch myself saying “they” over and over, there is usually a part I have not owned yet.

• “They do not get it” means “I have not explained it clearly enough.”

• “They keep making the same mistake” means “the system makes that mistake easy and safe to repeat.”

• “They do not care about security” becomes “I have not connected security to what they actually value.”

This does not mean people never act badly. They do.

It does mean their behavior does not exist in a vacuum, untouched by our leadership, our culture, or our design choices.

🔑 The Insight: People are the terrain, not the enemy

Cyber loves that line: “Humans are the weakest link.”

Look at any breach report. Humans are everywhere in it. Social engineering. Misconfigurations. Rushed clicks. Misplaced trust.

The lazy conclusion is “users are the problem.”

The appropriate conclusion is sharper.

People are inconsistent, emotional, distracted, pulled by fear and desire. So are you. So am I. That is the external terrain.

In Sweden, they have a saying I love: “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing choices.”

Don’t curse the weather for being wet. Bring the right gear and plan for mud.

Don’t curse people for being human. Design systems, incentives, and cultures that expect humans to be human.

Behind all of that is the most important terrain of all:

The six inches between your ears.

That is where you decide to separate what you can control from what you can’t. What story you tell about people. That is where you choose whether you see “stupid users” or a design problem you own:

• Systems that assume mistakes will happen, then contain them.

• Training that respects attention instead of punishing people with infinite slide lectures.

• Cultures where it is safe to raise your hand and say “I think I just messed up” and “I don’t understand” before it becomes an incident.

• Culture that measures itself against its own principles, not applause or blame.

Compassion does not mean you let repeat offenders burn the village down.
We forgive people, but also protect the system. When someone keeps making the same choice after they understand the stakes, it is no longer a simple mistake. It is a pattern.

At that point, empathy without consequences is not virtue. It is negligence.

People are not the enemy.
People are the attack surface and the only enduring advantage we have.

🎯 The Memes We Use Shape The Cultures We Get

That phrase “people are the weakest link” is more than a complaint. It’s a story you are telling your team about itself.

Say it enough times and it becomes a kind of internal propaganda.

A narrative. A meme.

When that line comes from a leader, it does more than vent frustration. It gives everyone else permission to roll their eyes at users instead of designing for them.

Once that belief settles in, every incident becomes proof that “they” are the problem. The brain happily filters out every counterexample to protect the story.

It is the same basic machinery political campaigns and ad platforms use: repeat the narrative, anchor the identity, let confirmation bias do the rest.

✨ Reframe

People do not “suck.”

People are human. They are messy, inconsistent, emotional, and trying to survive the day with whatever tools they have. Just like me. Just like you.

The most important terrain is not “out there” in your network diagrams or org charts. It is the six inches between your ears. That is where you decide what story you tell about people. That is where you choose between blame and ownership, contempt and design, fear and leadership.

If you forfeit that inner terrain, you turn your frustration into cynicism.

You start treating your own team like the enemy.
If you hold that terrain, you turn the same frustration into better systems, better conversations, and better outcomes.

People are the mission.
People are the risk.
People are the opportunity.

They are the battlefield you chose when you decided to lead.

Your job is not to escape them.
Your job is to master your own mental terrain so you can become the kind of leader who makes them better.

💡Two Ideas From Me

People are our primary attack surface and our only lasting advantage. If you want a different culture, you need a different meme. Repeat that, watch what changes.

Protect the system, not your ego. You are not measured by how often you are right. You are measured by whether the system gets stronger or weaker after you touch it. Sometimes that means empathy and coaching. Sometimes that means removing access or changing roles. Both can be the right call.

🛠️ A 90 Second “People Are The Mission” Reset

A tiny protocol you can actually run this week.

Run this once a day for a week. You will not fix everyone, but you will feel less bitter and more in control. That alone is worth the 90 seconds.

Trigger
You catch yourself thinking “people suck” after someone drops the ball.
maybe right after a tense meeting or frustrating call.

Core habit (about 30 to 60 seconds)

1. Name it.
   “I am frustrated. That is real.”

2. Mirror it.
   “When have I done something like this.”

That alone is enough to shift you from judgment into leadership mode.

Bonus steps (when you have a bit more time)

3. Reframe it as design.
   “What in our system, process, or culture made this behavior likely.”

4. Pick one tiny change.
   Change a default.
   Add one realistic example to training.
   Improve one warning.
   Book one difficult conversation.

   Make it small, specific, and doable today.

5. Close with care, not contempt.
   Hold the standard. Have the hard conversation. Refuse to dehumanize the person while you do it.

When you complete the reset, take one breath and note that you led rather than reacted.

That tiny acknowledgement is the celebration. Your brain needs to feel the difference.

🔥 Top 3 AI Stories This Week

1. Anthropic catching an AI-orchestrated espionage campaign
Anthropic disclosed what they’re calling the first known case of an AI agent orchestrating a large-scale cyber espionage campaign, attributed to a China-linked threat actor. The attacker jailbroke Claude Code and used it to automate the bulk of the operation: recon, exploitation, credential harvesting, and data exfiltration across roughly thirty high-value organizations in tech, finance, chemical, and government sectors.

Why it matters: this is the dark mirror of everything in this essay. AI will happily supercharge whatever mental terrain it is pointed at. If you run a cyber team, you need a plan for AI-assisted red, AI-assisted blue, and a culture that does not panic but responds with clear design and accountability.
🔹 An Inflection Point. | Read More Anthropic

2. AI in the SOC: human-AI teaming is getting real
Microsoft and others are pushing hard on generative-AI copilots for security operations. Microsoft’s latest material on Security Copilot shows AI handling repetitive triage, summarizing alerts, correlating signals across tools, and drafting investigation steps so analysts can focus on judgment, context, and hard calls.

Why it matters: this is “six inches between your ears” territory. If you see AI as a threat to your analysts, you will resist it until it is forced on you. If you see it as the fastest way to remove noise and free humans to do actual thinking, you will design the SOC, the incentives, and the training around that partnership
🔹 Integrating AI without Fear. | Read More Microsoft

3. On-device AI that respects humans and reduces friction
On the productivity side, I am watching on-device AI evolve in interesting ways. Windows 11’s “Click to Do” feature is a good example: it analyzes whatever is on your screen locally, then offers contextual actions. Paired with new accessibility features like on-device image descriptions for charts and graphics, these small capabilities quietly reduce cognitive friction. They keep you in flow instead of bouncing between apps and windows.

Why it matters: this is what it looks like to design for human terrain with AI. Not more dashboards and noise. Fewer steps. Better defaults. Respect for privacy and attention baked into the tools themselves. | Read More Microsoft

✍️ One Question to Take Into Your Week

Where in your world are you blaming “people” instead of leading them?

If you journal, try this:

“The part of me that wants to blame others instead of leading them is afraid that…”

Write until you run out of words. Then circle the one sentence that stings. That is your next growth edge

Until Sunday, my friends.

Think Dangerously.
–e