Trapped in a passion, by Tanakawho

Trapped in a passion, by Tanakawho

People often come up to me and say things like, “Wow, you really are passionate about your work!” Aside from the old “Do what you love, and love what you do” adages our great grandparents regurgitate to us when they see us struggling with some arguably trivial thing in our work lives, passion is something that people can see on you.

We’ve all sat through one of those talks at a conference or an association meeting where it is clear that the speaker is just going through the motions. Maybe they are not just reading right off the slides, but you can tell that the only thing they are thinking about is hitting the tables, bar, or airport. Did you really listen to their message? Or were you also thinking about hitting the tables, bar, or airport?

When you are talking to co-workers outside of security, do you exude passion for your work? Sure, they may not care that something you did increased productivity of the workforce by deploying a spam filtering solution, or that you helped an inexperienced netizen tell the difference between a real email from your company and a phishing attack.

I’m not trying to pull a Zig Ziglar on you, but stop for a moment and think about your current position. If you are in security, are you passionate about it? Does that passion come through in your interaction with co-workers? Do your projects get extra care and feeding because you really want to see it done right? Are you passionate about security?

If not, maybe you are in the wrong job. We need passionate people to evoke the change required to achieve our goals. We need people who care enough about security to spend the extra twenty minutes helping a curious co-worker understand why we need to block his MySpace, and offer alternatives so that he can use his break time efficiently enough to get his fix.

Security is close to a tipping point. We’ve finally made it past the whiz kid techie that knows some security stuff to organized security departments and functions that

This post originally appeared on BrandenWilliams.com.

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