As you might recall, my 2 year old likes to sing. In fact, she sings literally hours every day. When we’re on the way to school, she sings. When she’s taking a bath, she sings. And since we got her and her brother a kiddie karaoke cube for Christmas, she wants to sing pretty much every day as soon as she wakes up.
Today, we were going through some of what she likes to sing, and she started singing one of the counting songs she learned from Netflix where there are frogs on a log, and they jump off, teaching the basics of subtraction.
However, it got me to thinking about another story of frogs on a log. There were 3 frogs, Harry, Larry and Slim. It was a bright, sunny day, and so the 3 frogs decided to get some rays. They saw a nearby log, swam over to it, and crawled out of the water. As the log floated lazily in the light current created by the wind on the water, they started talking about their problems.
Eventually, after listening to all this for a while, Slim looks at the others and says, “Right, you guys. I’m sick and tired of listening to you complain all the time. There’s always something wrong. There’s not enough flies to go around. The sun’s drying out your skin. All your kids ran off and left you.”
He winks a beady eye at the others and says, “I’m outta here. I’ve decided I’m going to find another log.”
And so the question to the reader in this story is: how many frogs are sitting on the log?
The answer?
It’s 3, of course.
Because, despite all the talk, and the apparent decision to find another log, Slim doesn’t actually take any action. He just sits there.
Now, I know from personal experience that in various times in our lives, and across the thousands of decisions we make as humans every day, we’ve all been Slim. We make a decision to do something…
…and yet…it just doesn’t quite happen.
Last week, I was speaking to a number of security architects working in big and small organizations who had, for one reason or another, decided to invest in growing their security skills through SABSA certification.
In one case, it was to build their CV so they could get a different job.
In another case, it was because they wanted to add more structure to the way they worked so they didn’t feel like they were “making it up as they went along.”
And in yet another case, it was because the organization they worked for believed in the promises of SABSA for aligning security to the business and being able to more easily get business stakeholders to take them seriously when they tried to ensure their security policies were actually implemented.
However, none of these 3 security architects had actually made any tangible progress in applying what they’d learned to change the way they worked…and to deliver the value they’d hoped to realize.
So each of these architects were really just like Slim…because they didn’t actually take the actions required to implement their decision.
Maybe you’ve decided that you too want to become a better security architect for more money, more credibility or to reduce the day-to-day stress of doing your job. And maybe you’ve decided that our Building Effective Security Architectures course is a good way to do it.
And maybe you’ve already taken action to implement your decision, and you’ve signed up for the next cohort starting on the 24th of February.
Or…maybe you haven’t.
The one thing I’d like you to remember either way – which is something that I teach during the the very first week of the course, and which I come back to as a recurring theme for the following 6 weeks – is that there’s only one way to actually make progress toward your goals: you have to decide how you’re going to spend your time, and you have to decide how you’re going to react to events.
And then you do it.
It’s the only way.
Time is getting short to act on the decision to join the course if that’s what you’ve decided to do—and especially if you have to jump through the hoops of a complicated approval process.
If you make the decision to join us, here’s the link you need to act on it:
Stay safe,
ast
—
Andrew S. Townley
Archistry Chief Executive
