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Incite 1/6/2016 — Recharging

Mike Rothman January 6, 2016 No Comments

The last time I took 2 weeks off was probably 20 years ago. As I write that down, it makes me sad. I’ve been been running pretty hard for a long time. Even when I had some forced vacations (okay, when I got fired), I took maybe a couple days off before I started focusing on the next thing. Whether it was a new business or a job, I got consumed by what was next almost immediately. I didn’t give myself any time to recharge and heal from the road rash that accumulated from one crappy job after another. Even when things are great, like the past 6 years working with Rich and Adrian, I didn’t take a block of time off. I was engaged and focused and I couldn’t wait to jump into the next thing. So I would. I spent day after day during the winter holidays as the only person banging away at their laptop at the coffee shop while everyone else was enjoying catching up with friends over Peppermint Mocha lattes. recharge I rationalized that I could be more productive because my phone wasn’t ringing off the hook and I wasn’t getting my normal flow of email. There wasn’t much news being announced and my buddies weren’t blogging at all. So I could just bang away at the projects I didn’t have time for during the year. Turns out that was nonsense. I was largely unproductive during winter break. I read a lot, spent time thinking, and it was fine. But it didn’t give me a chance to recharge because there was no separation. The truth is I didn’t know how to relax. Maybe I was worried I wouldn’t be able to start back up again if I took that much time away. It turns out the projects that didn’t get done during the year didn’t get done over break because I didn’t want to do them. So they predictably dragged on through winter break and then into the next year. That changed this year. I’m just back from two weeks pretty much off the grid. I took a week away with my kids. We went to Florida and checked out a Falcons game in Jacksonville, the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and Universal Studios in Orlando. We were able to work in some family time in South Florida for Xmas before heading back to Atlanta. I stayed on top of email, but only to respond to the most urgent requests. All two of them. I didn’t bring my laptop, so if I couldn’t take care of it on my iPad, it wasn’t getting done. Then I took a week of adult R&R on the beach in Belize. I’m too cheap to pay for international cellular roaming, so my connectivity was restricted to when I could connect to crappy WiFi service. It was hard to check email or hang out in our Slack room during a snorkeling trip or an excursion down the Monkey River. So I didn’t. And the world didn’t end. The projects that dragged through the year didn’t get done. But they weren’t going to get done anyway and it was a hell of a lot more fun to be in Belize than a crappy coffee shop pretending to work. I came back from the time off recharged and ready to dive into 2016. We’ve got a lot of strategic decisions to make as the technology business evolves towards cloud-everything and we have to adapt with it. I don’t spend a lot of time looking backwards and refuse to judge myself for not unplugging for all those years. But I’ll tell you, there will be more than one period of time where I’ll be totally unplugged in 2016. And I’ll be a hell of a lot more focused and productive when I return. –Mike Photo credit: “Recharging Danbo Power” from Takashi Hososhima The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the 2014 conference. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour. Your emails, alerts, and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and… hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. Dec 8 – 2015 Wrap Up and 2016 Non-Predictions Nov 16 – The Blame Game Nov 3 – Get Your Marshmallows Oct 19 – re:Invent Yourself (or else) Aug 12 – Karma July 13 – Living with the OPM Hack May 26 – We Don’t Know Sh–. You Don’t Know Sh– May 4 – RSAC wrap-up. Same as it ever was. March 31 – Using RSA March 16 – Cyber Cash Cow March 2 – Cyber vs. Terror (yeah, we went there) February 16 – Cyber!!! February 9 – It’s Not My Fault! January 26 – 2015 Trends January 15 – Toddler Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, with our content in all its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Building a Threat Intelligence Program Success and Sharing Using TI Gathering TI Introduction Network Security Gateway Evolution Introduction Recently Published Papers Threat Detection Evolution Building Security into DevOps Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks EMV Migration and the Changing Payments Landscape Applied Threat Intelligence Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices Cracking the Confusion: Encryption & Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers & Applications Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for AWS Security The Future of Security Incite 4 U Cloud vs. on-prem. Idiotic discussions continue: Do me a favor and don’t read this article trying to get to the bottom of whether the public cloud or on-prem

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