InsighaaS: Securosis is “an information security research and advisory firm dedicated to transparency, objectivity, and quality.” The company’s blog recently included this post, which looks at the difference between ‘builders’ and ‘maintainers’, and what that means to happiness and career trajectory. Having heard a manager respond to a question about career opportunities with the phrase “you have to decide if you are comfortable,” I can vouch for the veracity of Rothman’s/Lewis’s perspective…
One of our esteemed colleagues to the North, Dave Lewis, summed up a danger in almost everything in his recent CSO post, We need to be uncomfortable. Dave talks about realizing he could check out of a job and no one would notice, and how he knew it was time to find the next challenge. He’s right.
“The builders give way to the maintainers. Not that there is anything wrong with that per se. What I have seen happen in a few organizations is that they get used to doing things a very specific way and are not typically seen to think beyond the confines of their box. They have their infrastructure and governance framework to operate within and not a whole lot of incentive to approach things differently.
They had become comfortable.”
Complacency kills innovation. It kills forward motion. If you are in a role for too long and you get too good at it, you can check out. That kills your motivation. And that’s fine for some folks. As Dave says, some people are maintainers. At the other end of that scale are builders. If you want any chance to be happy in this life, you had better know where you lie on that continuum…
Read the entire post: https://securosis.com/blog/poor-mans-immortality
