Try Things. Fuck Up. Fail, and Move On.

What's your motivation? (Third and Lake)

It was my hope that I could build a successful career with a nice tidy salary from making apps or writing and selling music. The motivation was always a financial one. As such, each time I tried, I failed, because my heart wasn’t really in it – I wanted an immediate financial return with the least amount of effort on my part. This sounds like a bad trait, but in hindsight I think it a great one! See, it made me realise that money is a piss-poor motivator to me. I honestly don’t care about it, once I have enough to get by. Sure it’s nice to have new gadgets or to splash out once in a while on something, but, that’s just nowhere near a big enough reason for me to be motivated, consistently.

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Ditto! Money has never motivated me. It has always been about learning and doing. Over the last few years, the pressure to succeed and provide for a family has made me focus more on the financial rewards. But I've started to realize that I am not happy about my work. I no longer look forward to the next day's challenge. Now, I can't wait for the weekend.

I realized that as a security professional, what I enjoyed the most was learning how things work, learning how to break it, and then finding ways to defend it from other breakers. I enjoyed vulnerability testing. But it's been a while since I did any of that work. I have been too focused on business skills, policies and procedures and strategic thinking. It's helped get me into the same room as the "C" suite. I get to be involved in large projects. But ... it's not enjoyable.

So ... I want to go back to school. I don't mean college. I mean taking a course on penetration testing and network reconnaissance. I mean getting back to where it all started for me in information security. I want my name to be Khürt "I break shit" Williams.

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