Happy Sunday Friends! Here is 1 quote I’m musing, 2 Ideas, 3 of my favorite things from the week, and 1 question. If you find it useful or interesting, please feel free to forward this along to some friends or others!

One Quote I’m Musing

“Just because something is hard to master, do not think it is humanly impossible, but, if a thing is humanly possible, consider it within your reach.”

-Marcus Aurelius

We can learn anything and figure it out given the right mindset.

The Hacker’s Mindset

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to create a culture in an organization where what we do are largely things that have either never been done (to our knowledge) and/or we have just discovered a new technology, signal of interest, protocol, etc. In this, initiative, ingenuity, and innovation are a must.

Much of this will involve learning, or having already learned, about the topic.

Enter the mindset I’m looking for. The Hacker’s Mindset. No, not the immediate image of someone coding away at 3am, building malware in a hoodie. That is part of it, but what I’m talking about are people who live to figure things out. We learn largely through Just-in-Time learning; in contrast to Just-in-Case learning.

Now, Just-in-Time learning is where we learn things at the moment it becomes useful and necessary to us to learn them.

Just-in-Case learning is when we learn something in-case we need it (or it becomes useful) later. It isn’t necessarily applicable or practical right now, but we learn it “Just in Case”.

In university and with certifications, we memorize the models, the rules, the textbook, learning just in case. Then we go to the CTFs and the live networks and experience all the stuff happening at once and try to correlate all the information we read to the things we are seeing.

And that’s a historical model we’ve used across academia and most of the world. It has worked.

But what I’m suggesting as a better way is to flip the order.

Encounter all those things first, then go learn about them.

I know, I know. I can already hear many of you screaming at me; and I agree with you. It’s important to have broad foundations and model maps.

But when you’ve encountered something in real life. If you see an active DDoS shutting down availability for your users both internally and external clients. Or you see the hospital’s patients held at risk because the respiratory and surgical devices are locked down by WannaCry.

Then all the information you take in about proper controls, policies, and procedures as well as periodicity of review and patch Tuesday, and analyzing interactions between services, processes, programs, and interactions they have at each layer… It all becomes 100 times more useful when you’ve actually seen the thing happen in real life.

Whereas we can read and memorize (hopefully) all that same stuff, then experience it later in real life and we realize, “Oh man, it’s very different”.

Vignette:

Think about deciding to build an app. You create the app, it’s beautiful, it integrates seamlessly between web and mobile. But then you have to get people to use it. So, you read all about funnels and marketing. If you’re a techie like me. Most if it isn’t that applicable at first. Then we can’t remember all the info we just read about marketing and sales.
That’s because we don’t have any practical experience to hang the knowledge and information. But if we flip it action and theory and go try to sell the idea and concept of the app to our friends, our family we learn so much about what they (and we) need. Then when we read up, it all makes more sense and is way more applicable.

Back to the Culture. The “Hacker” mindset that I’m looking to inculcate across the organization is really an incredibly astute Just-In-Time model of learning.

It’s a bit like instead of buying and reading the 1200-page textbook to learn what to do, we dive in, F.A.I.L early, hit our blocker and flip to the chapter that teaches us the thing we need to learn to keep going and then do it again and again.

-e

Two Ideas From Me

Eschew focusing on top performance and instead focus on the fundamentals. See how much you can improve simply by showing up when skipping is easy and perform reliably in everyday moments.
Mastery is doing something complicated simply. Never take four steps to complete something that can be done in three.

Three Favorite Things From Others

“Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.” - Steven Wright
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Haruki Murakami, excerpt from Norwegian Wood | More
“You’re never ready for what you have to do. You just do it. That makes you ready.” - Flora Rheta Schreiber | More

One Question

Think about your past bosses, the best and the worst. What did you learn from each?

Have a wonderful week,

I’ll see you Sunday.
-e