Merry Christmas!!
Outside of all the regular Christmas hustle and bustle, one of the biggest news stories of the month (especially in the business world) has been the cyber-attacks on Sony US. Despite the realism behind these otherwise idle threats, this attack may have been the greatest thing for us. Make no mistake that it was truly an attack; then compare it to attacks on skyscrapers and government buildings. In each case, there were lessons we learned as a nation, but unlike those tragedies, the only destruction here was a stupid movie with a classless plot. Personally, I thought we were already ahead by losing "The Interview" in the first place. Its premise made me cringe when I saw it first advertised at the MTV Video Music Awards in September. Then again, I also remembered how awful "Buffalo '66" was.
More importantly, however, the takeaway in this case is protecting our cyber information. There has never been a hack job of this magnitude (that we know of) since the rise of the Internet, so our security measures have gotten really lax. Before 9/11, our airport security being woefully undermined was the worst kept secret in the world. Even "Family Guy" aptly joked about it in 2000, complete with a punchline referencing Osama bin Laden. Our online security may benefit from an overhaul of inconvenience as well, but mostly, individuals need to apply their own common sense.
I had always known that the Internet is a very impersonal means of communication. Not just impersonal in the social sense, where one read through the troll comments on CNN.com or YouTube would validate the position, but also impersonal in the sense of privacy. A couple of my first "online friends" were skilled hackers, so I felt first- and second-hand of how little privacy existed online.
My second-hand account came at the expense of a budding celebrity at the time. It was about 1999 when the WWF was nearing new heights of popularity. There was a popular wrestler named Jeff Hardy who, in real life, was a real "artist" type. He was a drawer, a musician, an motorbike obstacle course runner, and a pro wrestler to top off the list. He was a favorite among the Internet Wrestling Community. Within my circle of online friends, drawings started circulating that were attributed to Jeff Hardy. We were all wrestling fans, so the images were widely praised. But they immediately chilled me, knowing that if the story were true, then these files were not for our enjoyment. The story was that someone (at face value, it was someone within our circle of friends) allegedly hacked into his personal computer and retrieved the files. There was nothing explicitly wrong with the art, only the means of access to them. If it could happen to Jeff Hardy, I knew it could happen to anyone. In fact, I had already had my own first-hand account, so this incident merely reinforced my knowledge.
My first-hand account was a year or two earlier. Back when group emails were the popular method of social networking (before social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace, or even Friendster), I had my own friends. Like any group of college friends, we had periods of disliking each other and we had arguments and disagreements within the group. In one such instance, I was emailing back and forth with one of the girls in our group about another member of our group.
Within a few minutes, I received an email directly the guy who we were badmouthing that kindly noted he knew I was talking to her and I had "said quite enough." He and I happened to both live in Phoenix, so he was the only person in the group that I met in person. During one such visit, he shared with me the pictures of this girl in our group, which he had obtained by hacking into her computer. Therefore, when I received his passive threat, I knew he had seen what I had written.
I had two minds about it: first, he got more than what he went looking for when he found that not everybody in our group cared for him personally, and second, this is why "if you cannot say something nice, don't say anything at all" is a valuable cliché.
Honestly, I was lucky in my cyber-attack. He had not hacked my personal computer (albeit, there would be nothing incriminating on there if he had) and the things I said about him behind his back was in fact what I wanted him to know if I had the blunt audacity to tell him directly. Regardless, any violation feels violating. That characteristically sickening feeling was with me, but from it I learned that talking about people behind their backs truly lacked value and that there was no such thing as "a private email."
The latter is a lesson for us to learn now, especially in the corporate world. We have paid it lip-service for years, but I question how many people have had experiences like mine to learn the lesson personally. Any preventative steps created in the wake of this cyber-attack could be an improvement over what little we have now.
Thursday, December 25, 2014
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Exceleration
"When you're good, work finds you." --Bruno Lauer
I have been at my current position at work for over a year now. I have learned tremendous amounts about my job itself in that time, and, for the first job in my life, I have learned a lot about myself. The hardest part of my job search prior to this position was knowing the truth of the above words. I had always thought I was a good worker, but now getting into this position where they teach you how to maximize your skills, through encouragement and through setting you up for success, I have found my failures.
I love telling the story that I went into law to get out of finance, but then I got hired in the legal department of a finance company, so I'm still technically in finance. In reality, I did not want to leave the finance world; I wanted to leave my former-employer. I did not need to change careers; I needed to change jobs. I did not know the flaws of where I was before; I know now.
Having worked for a group of supervisors that impress success upon me is a world of difference from where I was in my last position. Although I identified the fact that we were "set up for failure" in my first months of taking the floor at my last department, I did not actualize the scope to which it occurred until I got a better basis for comparison.
Everything in my last job was centered around failure. They called it "opportunities." For every achievement reached, it had to be balanced in our assessments with another opportunity area. Everyone subscribed to this theory, and they fed it into normalcy, defining the culture of the company.
Success went up the ladder; failures went down the ladder. For almost ten years, I was in an entry-level position (just above, actually, but still I was the tenured associate for brand new employees, doing the same job, so for all intents and purposes, mine was an entry-level position). During that time, my focus shifted away from failure to other areas where I could succeed.
Enter the unbelievable world of professional wrestling and its independent circuits. Unbeknownst to me until July 2004, there was a local wrestling promotion in Phoenix. As soon as I found out, I saddled into the seat and attended every single event of their episodic series for the next five years. During that time, my fascination accelerated into obsession, and I partly transcended into the company itself.
I grew up loving pro wrestling, literally. As I matured, my love for the business did as well. Even when I was well outside the key demographics of its target market, I enjoyed its programming on levels where it fit into my life.
I never lived vicariously through the wrestlers themselves. I never wanted to step inside the ring. But I loved the storytelling, the performance art of pro wrestling. If anything, I wanted to write wrestling matches. Once I started contributing to the local wrestling promotion, I had an idea to freelance for my favorite wrestling publication, Pro Wrestling Illustrated, and I had considered sending them articles based on the local wrestlers as samples of my writing skills.
For whatever reasons, I did not take that step, but I did get my articles published on the website of the local wrestling promotion's website. Then I modified a ranking system I had developed for WrestleMania to fit that promotion. For the next many years, that system was used to rank the local wrestlers. It was virtually frivolous information, but it was unique to the business. Pro Wrestling Illustrated had its own ranking system (which still remains a mystery to me) but I figured our local promotion would look more legitimate if it had one, so I gave it one.
From there, I was given the opportunity to help write some of the angles in the local promotion, thereby achieving my wish to write the wrestling storylines. It was not even a matter of asking for it and the wish being granted. True to the Steve Martin's "be so good they cannot ignore you" quote, my ideas were often used simply because they were the best option. Not always. Once I earned more trust, I made my share of missteps, but the fact was that I did not ask to be part of the show. They asked me. Even those aforementioned rankings started appearing in the real Pro Wrestling Illustrated, thus accomplishing my goal to have my work published in PWI. The amazing part was that I never tried to do it. It just happened because I was doing a good job.
While success came naturally to me there, my professional failures came naturally to me at work. Eventually I put two-and-two together, quit my job, and moved on with my life. At the time, I thought I was good enough that work would find me. Unfortunately, it didn't. But I set out to earn another job.
The most telling conversation of my life occurred during my second of three job searches. My girlfriend at the time consoled me, "aren't you expecting too much from yourself? You are starting a new career with no experience, so it should take more time to get hired." I replied, "that is true, but I would sooner try harder than lower my own expectations."
That was a major breaking point at my last job. They reset the statistics upon which our work was gauged, and one of the measures was deeply flawed, so they lowered the levels to compensate for it. That solution never set well with me, especially for a company that paid endless lip service to its own integrity.
Nowadays, I find myself reporting to people I truly look up to. People who are fully capable of doing my job, except they're so good that their work is needed on more important issues, so they have me doing work that they could otherwise do themselves. Of course, because they actually know how to perform my job, they are able to instruct me on how to successfully accomplish that job. (Compare that to my last department where none of our supervisors knew how to do our jobs, and our learning was a matter of "trial and error," again, centered around failure.)
I have been at my current position at work for over a year now. I have learned tremendous amounts about my job itself in that time, and, for the first job in my life, I have learned a lot about myself. The hardest part of my job search prior to this position was knowing the truth of the above words. I had always thought I was a good worker, but now getting into this position where they teach you how to maximize your skills, through encouragement and through setting you up for success, I have found my failures.
I love telling the story that I went into law to get out of finance, but then I got hired in the legal department of a finance company, so I'm still technically in finance. In reality, I did not want to leave the finance world; I wanted to leave my former-employer. I did not need to change careers; I needed to change jobs. I did not know the flaws of where I was before; I know now.
Having worked for a group of supervisors that impress success upon me is a world of difference from where I was in my last position. Although I identified the fact that we were "set up for failure" in my first months of taking the floor at my last department, I did not actualize the scope to which it occurred until I got a better basis for comparison.
Everything in my last job was centered around failure. They called it "opportunities." For every achievement reached, it had to be balanced in our assessments with another opportunity area. Everyone subscribed to this theory, and they fed it into normalcy, defining the culture of the company.
Success went up the ladder; failures went down the ladder. For almost ten years, I was in an entry-level position (just above, actually, but still I was the tenured associate for brand new employees, doing the same job, so for all intents and purposes, mine was an entry-level position). During that time, my focus shifted away from failure to other areas where I could succeed.
Enter the unbelievable world of professional wrestling and its independent circuits. Unbeknownst to me until July 2004, there was a local wrestling promotion in Phoenix. As soon as I found out, I saddled into the seat and attended every single event of their episodic series for the next five years. During that time, my fascination accelerated into obsession, and I partly transcended into the company itself.
I grew up loving pro wrestling, literally. As I matured, my love for the business did as well. Even when I was well outside the key demographics of its target market, I enjoyed its programming on levels where it fit into my life.
I never lived vicariously through the wrestlers themselves. I never wanted to step inside the ring. But I loved the storytelling, the performance art of pro wrestling. If anything, I wanted to write wrestling matches. Once I started contributing to the local wrestling promotion, I had an idea to freelance for my favorite wrestling publication, Pro Wrestling Illustrated, and I had considered sending them articles based on the local wrestlers as samples of my writing skills.
For whatever reasons, I did not take that step, but I did get my articles published on the website of the local wrestling promotion's website. Then I modified a ranking system I had developed for WrestleMania to fit that promotion. For the next many years, that system was used to rank the local wrestlers. It was virtually frivolous information, but it was unique to the business. Pro Wrestling Illustrated had its own ranking system (which still remains a mystery to me) but I figured our local promotion would look more legitimate if it had one, so I gave it one.
From there, I was given the opportunity to help write some of the angles in the local promotion, thereby achieving my wish to write the wrestling storylines. It was not even a matter of asking for it and the wish being granted. True to the Steve Martin's "be so good they cannot ignore you" quote, my ideas were often used simply because they were the best option. Not always. Once I earned more trust, I made my share of missteps, but the fact was that I did not ask to be part of the show. They asked me. Even those aforementioned rankings started appearing in the real Pro Wrestling Illustrated, thus accomplishing my goal to have my work published in PWI. The amazing part was that I never tried to do it. It just happened because I was doing a good job.
While success came naturally to me there, my professional failures came naturally to me at work. Eventually I put two-and-two together, quit my job, and moved on with my life. At the time, I thought I was good enough that work would find me. Unfortunately, it didn't. But I set out to earn another job.
The most telling conversation of my life occurred during my second of three job searches. My girlfriend at the time consoled me, "aren't you expecting too much from yourself? You are starting a new career with no experience, so it should take more time to get hired." I replied, "that is true, but I would sooner try harder than lower my own expectations."
That was a major breaking point at my last job. They reset the statistics upon which our work was gauged, and one of the measures was deeply flawed, so they lowered the levels to compensate for it. That solution never set well with me, especially for a company that paid endless lip service to its own integrity.
Nowadays, I find myself reporting to people I truly look up to. People who are fully capable of doing my job, except they're so good that their work is needed on more important issues, so they have me doing work that they could otherwise do themselves. Of course, because they actually know how to perform my job, they are able to instruct me on how to successfully accomplish that job. (Compare that to my last department where none of our supervisors knew how to do our jobs, and our learning was a matter of "trial and error," again, centered around failure.)
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