Understanding Career Motivations

How to Stay Consistent When Learning Cybersecurity (Even When Motivation Fades) Let’s be honest - starting is easy. Staying consistent? That’s the real challenge. If you’ve ever started strong, then lost motivation halfway through a course, lab, or certification prep… you’re not alone. Staying consistent is hard, but it’s also the biggest difference-maker. Cybersecurity isn’t something you learn in a weekend or even a few months. It’s a field that demands ongoing learning, frustration, trial and error, and lots of patience. Here’s what has helped me (and others) stay consistent over the long haul: 🔹 Start Small, Stay Focused You don’t have to master everything at once. Pick one skill. One course. One certification. Focus there until you make real progress—then move to the next thing. 🔹 Create a Simple Routine Learning cybersecurity isn’t about cramming for 8 hours one weekend. It’s about showing up daily, even if it’s just 30 minutes. Consistency beats intensity. Always. 🔹 Track/Share your progress Create a simple checklist. Seeing what you’ve completed, even if it feels small - reminds you that you’re moving forward. Also, Finished a lab? Understood a new concept? Post about it on LinkedIn, X, medium or your personal blog. Visibility helps your career. 🔹 Remember Your Why When motivation dips (because it will), remind yourself why you started. Better career? A passion for tech? Impact? Anchor yourself to that reason. 🔹 Celebrate boring wins Finished a long video series? Understood how SIEM works? Built a basic lab? Celebrate it. Progress isn’t always flashy, but it’s progress. 🔹 Stay connected to the community When you’re learning in isolation, it’s easy to lose steam. Join LinkedIn conversations, Discord groups, Slack channels, WhatsApp etc. Surround yourself with people on the same path. Motivation is what gets you started. Discipline is what keeps you moving. Have more tips? Share in the comments below. 👇 Also share this to your network to encourage others. #Cybersecurity #CybersecurityCareerGrowth

7 Lessons on Sustaining Passion and Purpose at Work 🔥 One of my favorite industries to study passion in is healthcare. Few other fields put human care and impact so visibly at the center of daily work. Healthcare professionals literally see the difference they make every day in their patients’ lives. That direct connection to impact is inspiring—and, honestly, something I often find myself craving in my own work as a researcher. But healthcare is, unfortunately, also one of the clearest examples of the downsides of passion. The same deep sense of purpose that draws so many into the field can, over time, make them vulnerable to burnout, exploitation, and disillusionment. --- Passion, if not sustained wisely, can fade, or even become destructive. --- I’m often asked: What strategies can help people maintain their motivation, passion, and sense of purpose over the long term? Based on my own and others’ research, here are a few key practices worth highlighting: 🌟 1) Anchor to Impact Regularly reflect on the people who benefit from your work. Patient stories or outcomes reinforce why the work matters and help renew motivation. [1] 🤝 2) Rely on the Team Supportive peers, mentors, and healthy team cultures buffer stress and prevent isolation. Passion spreads best in environments where energy is shared, not forced. [2] 📚 3) Keep Growing Continuous learning through new skills, challenges, or projects fuels progress and sustains engagement over time. [3] 🧭 4) Know Your Coping Style When facing setbacks, those who view their work as a calling may channel “hot” pain into renewed passion, while others—who see their work more as a job—recharge best by stepping away and finding distraction outside of work. Knowing which camp you fall into helps you cope more effectively. [ongoing research] ⚖️ 5) Manage Passion’s Costs A surge of passion can feel energizing and effortless, but it often leads to exhaustion the next day. Always remember that passion can make you overconfident. [4] Self-regulation practices help balance the highs and lows. [5] 🔥 6) Moderate Passion Don’t try to maximize passion—try to sustain it. Too much passion can hurt performance and increase burnout risk. The goal is a steady flame, not constant fireworks. [ongoing research] 🌙 7) Detach to Recharge Two decades of research show that psychological detachment from work—“switching off”—is one of the healthiest things you can do after hours. [6] Create rituals that help you mentally leave work behind. Even your commute, often seen as a nuisance, can actually serve this purpose. [7]

Compete With Potential, Not People I’ve heard it everywhere—locker rooms, meeting rooms, mastermind groups: “Keep an eye on the competition.” But it took years of coaching leaders, athletes, and myself to realize ➤ Your only actual competition is your own potential. Why does this truth matter so much to growth and development? Because the brain is wired for comparison, but those external benchmarks are shifting, incomplete, and rarely relevant to who you can become. Obsessing over someone else’s finish line distracts you from what’s possible for you. When you shift the lens inward, something changes. Neuroscience tells us that progress, not comparison, is what releases the dopamine that fuels real motivation. When you’re pulled by your own potential, accountability sticks and setbacks become feedback, not failure. Here’s why this mindset changes everything—for my clients and for myself: → I find more joy in the process, not just outcomes. → Challenges stop feeling like threats and start feeling like invitations. → Feedback feels less personal, more directional—a roadmap, not a verdict. → The idea of “not enough” gets replaced by “what’s next for me?” Ready to compete against your potential instead of your peers? Here’s how to begin: 🔹STEP #1: Define your “next level.” Write down one capability you know you haven’t maxed out yet. 🔹STEP #2: Set progress markers that actually excite you—not just what looks good on paper. 🔹STEP #3: Reflect weekly: Did I close the gap against my own best, or just chase someone else’s standard? 🔹STEP #4: Celebrate inner milestones as fiercely as you would a public win. Your brain thrives when the measuring stick is your own growth curve. Start using it. Dreams get loudest when we quiet the need to look sideways. Coaching can help; let's chat. Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Joshua Miller for more tips on coaching, leadership, career + mindset. #executivecoaching #mindset #careeradvice #leadership

I asked ex-Amazonians about the good ✅ and bad 🛑 of working at Amazon ➤ Steve Huynh was a Principal Engineer who spent 18 years at Amazon. ✅ Amazon has a powerful writing culture that forces clarity of thought. 🛑 The lack of level granularity (especially beyond Senior) drives many talented engineers to leave the company. ➤ Sanyukta Sinha is an SDE 2 who has worked at Amazon for 4 years. ✅ High-ownership culture where you can do a lot more than your job title. 🛑 Intense work culture: Amazon has worse on-calls and work/life balance compared to peer companies. ➤ Lee McKeeman was an engineer and manager across 8+ years. ✅ Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles that guide decision making and understanding across the employees. 🛑 Performance reviews and management are opaque. Ratings may be adjusted down, and ad-hoc feedback can be harder to come by. ➤ Rúben Carvalho was an engineer in Germany for almost 3 years. ✅ Huge potential for impact given the scale that Amazon operates. Lots of smart people to learn from. 🛑 Employees are expected to go above and beyond their job descriptions or risk being managed out. See their full thoughts: https://lnkd.in/gvKxY5A9

Recruiters want you to be successful. I've seen a lot of jobseekers as well as influencers who give career advice talk about how you recruiters shouldn't be asking about job hopping or resume gaps, and how recruiters are looking for reasons to reject candidates. I think this can set up an unnecessarily adversarial dynamic. I can't speak for all recruiters but for internal recruiters - those of us employed by companies to help build and grow the teams we support - our success at work and is tied up in yours so we're rooting for you. Most of us are paid salaries, we don't have quotas, and if we're talking to you, it's because we genuinely think you have potential. Our job is to understand your background and trajectory, and to ask questions that we know the hiring manager will ask us so we can be ready to explain why things may or may not be a concern. - Job hopping: 3 back to back sub-1 year stints or seeing 4 jobs in 5 years will often raise eyebrows for a hiring manager, especially for more senior roles where your first few months are spent ramping up. Short stints could mean that someone struggles to ramp up to a new work place. Or it could mean that they do really well and are getting recruited away. We're going to want to understand the context so we can alleviate those concerns. - Resume gaps: Most hiring managers seem unconcerned with a gap here and there. But frequent gaps between jobs could indicate a pattern of poor performance or quitting jobs after a rough day. A gap spanning several years could mean your skills are rusty so understanding what you did in that time could be helpful as the recruiters discusses your candidacy with the hiring team. - Career trajectory: promotions are often indicators that someone did really well and was a top performer which the business rewarded, but lack of promotions doesn't necessarily mean someone didn't perform well. It could mean the company was stagnant, it could mean they are highly motivated by a certain type of work and aren't chasing promotions. Understanding a bit about the path your career has taken and where you see yourself going over time can help us bring a hiring manager into the conversation. We're not coming from a place of criticism or looking for reasons not to hire you. But we do need to be able to address the questions and concerns a hiring team or an executive may have about your experience. If we can't do that, we're not doing our jobs, and we're not doing right by our company, or by you.

FROM DOUBTING YOUR PATH TO DESIGNING YOUR DESTINY: WHY YOUR MINDSET IS THE ULTIMATE CAREER HACK A few days ago, I had the incredible privilege of speaking to a group of bright, ambitious students from across Indonesia as part of the L'Oréal for Youth initiative. Many of us, when we think about our careers, picture a straight ladder. But if I had to pick an image to describe my own journey, and the journeys of the most successful people I know, it would be more like a winding, mountainous trail—sometimes foggy, sometimes steep, but always with a breathtaking view for those who keep climbing. The Day I Understood My "Why" It’s about my late father, Tun Yulianto. When he passed away, there were many flowers coming from various people and it was that many that it filled all the walls and we laid all the flowers up to the entrance parking of the funeral home. Seeing that many people actually cared about him made me thought what did my father do for his 70 years life in this world? Dead people could not ask living being to send flowers, it came from the impact that he created when he was alive. I was struck by the power of a life lived with purpose. My father wasn't driven by fame or fortune, but by a deep-seated desire to contribute. That is the essence of finding your "Ikigai" or "Kokorozashi"—your reason for being. Your career preparation shouldn't start with chasing a job title. It must start with a journey inward to understand what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. This purpose is the foundation of a growth mindset. Building Your Career Story, One Challenge at a Time With a growth mindset, your focus shifts from "proving you're good enough" to "becoming better than you were yesterday." This changes everything about how you prepare for your career. Embrace CHALLENGES A growth mindset shatters the negative perception of challenges. It sees them as fruitful learning experiences. When I was building my career, every "no," every tough project, every mistake was a lesson in disguise. Fearing mistakes is the biggest mistake you can make. Foster GRIT Angela Duckworth famously defined grit as the power of passion and perseverance. It’s about working on something you care about so much that you're willing to stay loyal to it, especially when things get tough. Incorporate "I CAN" How often do you hear that little voice saying, "I can't do it"? A growth mindset actively works to silence that voice. It practices saying, "I can." "I can learn that skill." "I can overcome this obstacle." This small shift in vocabulary signals to your brain that anything is achievable with time and effort. Your journey is your own. The path may not always be clear, the climb may be tiring, and you will face moments of doubt. But your potential is not defined by your university's ranking or your current circumstances. It is defined by the size of your ambition and the strength of your mindset.

Have you ever wondered 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗲𝗹, 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻? 𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦, 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑓𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑓𝑜𝑐𝑢𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑑𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑟𝑒 32% 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑒 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔-𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑟 𝑠𝑢𝑐𝑐𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑑𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑏𝑦 𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑠 (𝑆𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑐𝑒: 𝐻𝑎𝑟𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝐵𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑅𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤). In my early years in IT, I relied heavily on external validation to fuel my ambitions. It was the praise from my peers and the accolades from my superiors that pushed me forward. However, I gradually realized this wasn't sustainable. Real growth began when I shifted focus from external motivation to cultivating my own internal discipline. This transition wasn't just a change in mindset but a strategic move that enhanced my career longevity and satisfaction. Internal discipline empowers you to take control of your career trajectory, making you less dependent on external circumstances. It ensures consistency in your performance and helps you navigate the ups and downs of the IT industry with resilience and determination. Whether you're aiming for a senior management role or looking to pivot to a new specialization, developing this inner resilience can set you apart. To your success, Coach Vandana Dubey 𝐸𝑙𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑟𝑠, 𝐸𝑛𝑟𝑖𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑆𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑠 #LeadershipDevelopment #CareerGrowth #ITProfessionals #Motivation #Resilience LinkedIn News India

𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞. 𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐯𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤. 𝐒𝐨 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐥 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡? ’ll be honest — I used to think experience alone would fast-track success. But somewhere along the way, I hit a wall. And I’ve seen so many other smart, hardworking professionals face the same invisible roadblocks. After working with 100 + mid-career professionals (and reflecting on my journey), I realised the struggle isn’t always external — it’s internal. Here are 5 things I’ve found that quietly hold people back from breakthrough results: 🔹 Fear & Limiting Beliefs That inner voice that says, “What if I fail?” or “Am I even good enough?” It’s louder than we admit. 🔹 Unclear Value Proposition It’s not just about having skills — it’s about knowing your true strengths and communicating them confidently. 🔹 Lack of a Strong “WHY” Without clarity and a burning desire, motivation fizzles. You end up busy, not purposeful. 🔹 Inconsistent Action We know what to do, but we slip back into old patterns without systems, routines, and accountability. 🔹 Impatience with Results When progress feels slow, we start to doubt the process (or ourselves). This is where many give up. 👉 I’ve faced most of these at some point. And the moment I started addressing them internally, things began to shift externally. My coaches and mentors played a vital role in all these breakthroughs. Curious — which one of these hits home for you right now? DM "Growth" to have an open conversation about your next breakthrough. #CareerGrowth #LeadershipJourney #PersonalBreakthrough #MindsetShift #MidCareerCoaching #ProfessionalDevelopment #GrowthMindset

How do you stay motivated when your career BHAG is so audacious it may ultimately be out of reach? I recently learnt that Australia just got its first female astronaut, Katherine Bennell-Pegg, after she qualified through the European Space Agency.  But despite spending her whole life in pursuit of her goal she may never actually get to space. So how do you stay sane whilst not giving up on your dream? 🎮 Focus on the things you can control Even if complete success isn’t in your control many things on the path to that goal will be. If it’s important to you don’t lose sight of it, don’t get distracted, stack the cards in your favour at every opportunity. 🔄 Realise that the path to your ultimate goal may not be linear and embrace it The sideways moves, even the wrong moves, will teach you something - as long as you are paying attention. Katherine has worked as a mechanical engineer, a physics researcher, computer programmer, Australian Army Reservist, volunteer in the NSW SES, and travelled to India with Engineers Without Borders. oh and also took time out to have her two daughters. It’s never been a completely straight line but all those adventures (including aerobatic flying lessons) have all benefited her ultimate objective. 🍾 Celebrate the wins along the way We so often forget to celebrate the small steps along the way. And without those moments of celebration and self recognition it can be easy to get overwhelmed with the huge mountain ahead of you. Our brains are wired to respond to rewards (dopamine hit anyone?) and Harvard University research found that people who celebrated the small wins enhanced their motivation and led to greater success in achieving those big goals. 🌏 Don’t make your entire life about that one thing If your self worth is tied up in a career goal, particularly if it’s not entirely in your control, it’s a problem. And let’s face it, nothing is ever entirely in your control. Make sure you find and create value across your career so if that one ultimate goal escapes you, for whatever reason, it doesn’t break you. Katherine has publicly talked about finding side passions so that she still has a rewarding career even if she doesn’t make it all the way to space. ❤️ Don’t tie you whole self worth into your career Your job, no matter how great, won’t love you back. Your friends and family, if you prioritise them, will. And the right support crew will keep you motivated. 🚀 BUT if you do have that big, bold, audacious goal don’t let the risk of failure stop you When Katherine was at school she was asked to write down three career goals. She only wrote one - astronaut. And now she’s Australia’s first female astronaut and inspiring the next generation of girls to embrace STEM careers. Your playing small doesn’t benefit the world. Shoot your shot. #LinkedInNewsAustralia.