I was running through some Twitter posts from some friends / colleagues / random InfoSec folks, and I saw one from Jack Daniel that led me to his latest blog post. In the post, Jack quickly covers the topic of preaching to the choir and staying in our own infosec echo chamber. He says it is fine to listen to and have discussions with like-minded people in conferences, etc, but he also correctly points out that it becomes a problem “when we never leave these enclaves”, and how we need to “share what we learn” and “get our teeth kicked in by the realities of the real world, business needs, people’s priorities and biases”.
And as I read through the post, it struck me how much it reminded of the sermon at my church from yesterday (Jack kinda reminds me of Jesus sometimes – it’s the beard thing – but that’s not where I am going here). In the sermon, the pastor talked about how “the World is a Waffle”. He demonstrated by showing how when you pour syrup on a pancake, it immediately spreads out over the pancake, but when you pour syrup on a waffle, it gets stuck in each chamber of the waffle. His point was that many of us never venture out to talk to others outside of our comfortable little group, and how we could show a lot of people a lot of love if we would just dare to get uncomfortable.
That is really just human nature. There are a few of us out there who are cool with getting to know all kinds of people, who actually feel comfortable when they feel uncomfortable (if that makes sense). But most of us are not like that. We want to stay in our little area of comfort. And that is very true when it comes to our chosen profession. We are just human, after all, so we like it when people agree with us or at least like to talk about the same thing we do. But if we would just get out and converse, get to know people, get out of our shell, we would not only learn a lot of new stuff and new perspectives, we would actually teach them a thing or two!
Just try it. You might like it!
