I noticed something rather unattractive about my behavior late last year.

I had fallen into the habit of being overly critical in my view of the world. It was just so easy to criticize organizations that had failed in some way. This tendency is one of the uglier sides of the security industry.

And I had let myself fall in with it.

Why It’s Easy to be Critical

After an episode of the Security Weekly News podcast and I realized I had been really critical in my commentary.

I had focused solely on the problem that was covered in my news story and was critical of whoever was affected by it. I usually wrote my commentary not long before going live, so I was often in a rush to finish. This made it easy for me to simply point at an issue, be a bit snarky for entertainment value, and leave it at that.

It was the easy road and was utterly useless.

Finding Solutions Takes Work

Even as I write this, I find myself thinking about the problem instead of the solution.

It’s hard to avoid being negative and critical. In security we look for problems and they are many to find. The difficult part is finding solutions to those problems. We won’t find easy answers to difficult questions and problems.

Instead we need to sit with the discomfort of a problem and explore ideas to solve it.

It is not a process with many dopamine hits. You start off with an idea of how to approach the issue, then immediately find reasons why that approach may not work. Perhaps those issues are show stoppers, but they are likely a sub-problem that needs to be broken down and addressed.

Finding a solutions is usually iterative process with many setbacks.

So what do I do? The only solution I can come up with is to change my focus from being problem seeking to solution seeking. And then direct my efforts accordingly.

If nothing else, I might be less overwhelmed by my own issues and find more solutions to them. I think I could use some more of that.