Happy Sunday Friends!

Welcome back to another Sunday Friends! I’m glad you’re here. Here is your Sunday Musings, a quick dose of what I’m exploring and thinking about. If you find it useful, please feel free to forward this along to friends!

Imposter Syndrome and Anxiety

I was chatting with a friend and mentor of mine about a course I’m attending. For any who don’t know, I’m attending a course for personnel who are transitioning to cyber in the military. Two main questions came out. First, why are you attending this when you’ve been in it for years? Second, isn’t it outside of what your roles are now and in the future?

He’s right, technically, on both counts. The course sections are teaching important technician-level skills like subnetting by hand (/24 is 256 hosts -2) and bash scripting for automation.

Am I learning new things about MY positions or my next positions? Unequivocally no. I’m long past being the guy who’s going to hack anything for a living.

Am I uncomfortable? Unequivocally yes. I’m learning how much I don’t know about things like reverse shell from behind a tertiary network where I can only access what I want by pivoting through four systems, each requiring their own local shell and then enumeration and exploration. Ultimately having to figure out how to telnet into a system and make it call me back so I can do what I want.

I am the cyber guy people call when investors and public officials want to know how well their money is being spent programmatically, or where a program in the portfolio misses the mark in development, when there may be a new precedent set by legislature, managing risk, and strategy for aligning cyber effects and security to business and operational goals / mission sets. I know cyber, I know mission management, I excel at policy, networking, threat analytics, and leading teams of leaders to bring national and international policy and precedent down to objective-oriented strategies. I can then communicate that to audiences from the tier I technicians to the CEOs, directors, and publicly elected officials.

“Translating one and zeroes to strategic context and strategic context down to the ones and zeroes.”

It gives me imposter syndrome.

Here’s how I combat imposter syndrome.

This time gives me a unique insight into how my people are trained. It gives me insight into the technical rigor required and just how much my expectations meet with the reality of their education.

This feeling of anxiety around “Not belonging”, and “I’m uncomfortable” that manifests as upset stomachs and cold sweats are a choice. It’s the same signal my brain sends to my body as excitement. Adrenaline hits, my heart beats faster, my breathing quickens to get more oxygen into my blood, I prepare for performance, or I prepare to flee.

I’m not perfect at this, but as soon as I recognize it (this week), I change my approach. I think “I am feeling the sensations I feel because this is uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable because this is a challenge, I’m excited for the challenge”. There’s not much more to it than that.

We all feel the chemicals in our body, I feel it when I speak on a panel, I feel it when answer to those officials during reviews or investigations. Heck, I feel it when I sing with my kids in public. It’s the brain and body doing what they’ve evolved to do to keep us alive.

Here’s a great study out of Harvard on anxiety and where the research team had two groups each sing “Don’t Stop Believing” in front of a large audience. One group was taught a ritual to tell themselves they were excited, while the other was left to their own devices. The ritual group performed better and had lower vitals by a significant margin.

So, now that you know about it, how do you think you would implement this? What stresses you out and how do you think reframing can help? Let me know!

This Week’s Recommendation

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

Thinslice

David Epstein looks at what makes the most successful athletes. Are they the people who took a singular skill and focused on it like Tiger Woods and golfing from age three? Or are they people who sample a wide gamut of sports and skills, then decide on one like Roger Federer who tried out many different sports until he went all in on tennis around age 16?

Turns out the data Epstein put together and analyzed shows that most of the elite athletes sampled many different sports, bringing those learned skills with them to the sport they chose to focus on.

This one hits home with my concept I call “Building the T” where you have a single thing you’re excellent at, but you must also build up proficiency in a wide variety of other skills and experiences that will help you get ahead in life as well as add color and enjoyment as well. (Topic for next week I think).

Technology I’m Looking At

Auto-GPT

Created by Significant Gravitas, it’s an experimental open-source application showcasing the capabilities of the GPT-4 language model. This program, driven by GPT-4, chains together LLM "thoughts", to autonomously teach itself and achieve whatever goal you set. As one of the first examples of GPT-4 running fully autonomously, Auto-GPT pushes the boundaries of what is possible with AI.

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Quote I’m Musing

“You have to ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand, and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can.”

-Robert Iger, From The Ride of a Lifetime

To be honest, the rest of his quote is so good and self-explanatory that I’m just going to give it to you in a block quote. I think this should be one of those long form quotes that is required study and debate.

"You have to be humble, and you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not or to know something you don’t. You’re also in a position of leadership, though, so you can’t let humility prevent you from leading. It’s a fine line, and something I preach today. You have to ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand, and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can. There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess. True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else."

To thin slice it. I boil it down to, we are here for a reason. We are in our positions for a reason. As leaders, we don’t have the luxury of pretending and we don’t often have the luxury of time. So, we have to ensure we know what we need to know, get the answers we need unabashedly, and voraciously pick up what we are lacking.

I would love your feedback!

Which musing is your favorite? What else do you want to see or what should I eliminate? Any other suggestions? Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or, eric@erichaupt.com for long form email.
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Have a wonderful week, I’ll see you Sunday.
​-e