alt Hacker NewsAfter ~15 years, I've realized that no good things come to you without sustained focus / attentiveness, and gentle pressure in the direction of attention. What everyone here is saying is "be closed loop", vs the drunkards "open loop". Combined with a bit of progress every day, it's (so far, at least) magical what happens.
Another bit to consider: It took a long time to realize that basically everyone wants basically everyone to succeed, as long as incentives align. It was very easy to imagine I was swimming upstream early in my career - especially my early mentors urging me to specialize to find success. My initial temptation was to "specialize" in hot/attractive topics in an effort to be the "indispensable X authority". But my PhD advisor urged me to "not swim in red water", where the incentives are inherently conflicting - everyone wants to be "the X person".
Much better to find a team working on a good problem somewhat like the ones you want to solve and just push along with them. You can save yourself a lot of energy by slotting yourself into a system that aligns with your preferred direction of travel, even if only a little bit. The current carries you.
Replies
I always wondered about that.
Seemed like everyone was doing topics in the “red water” and felt useless to not.
I found my areas of interest were the “red water” of 20 years prior and there was little left and it didn’t solve problems relevant to industry.
Quit PhD and got a job where I was grossly underpaid until the next one.
I literally fell into anti-fraud and email security back in 2012 and spent a totally unexpected chunk of my career around those topics.
The amount of people I've heard of say they want to go into email security is very small.