Pick a lane. Stay in it.

I picked computer science because law school meant staying in school longer than I wanted to be in it. That's the honest version. The real one is that I'd been fascinated with computers since I was a kid. I wanted to know how they worked, and then I wanted to know how to build one.

I fell in love with identity at SailPoint. Ten years into the career, I figured out that everything I'd learned up to that point was useful to somebody other than me. So I started speaking. I started writing. People followed, and it turned out they were genuinely interested in what I had to say. That was the turn — not the technology, the realization that I had something worth handing over.

I wrote the book because of a man in St. Louis. I'd just come off stage, and he walked up with tears in his eyes to tell me he was proud to see me up there with the CISOs. Eight years in this industry and he'd never seen anyone who looked like us on that stage. I figured it was a one-time thing. It kept happening. Eventually I ran out of reasons not to write it down.

People assume I picked up the rest of this later. A midlife thing, or a hedge. It's the opposite. When I was a teenager I watched a movie called Renaissance Man. It had almost nothing to do with the actual term, but it sent me to look the word up, and what I found there rearranged something. There was a time when a person was expected to be several things. An artist and a philosopher and a mathematician, in one lifetime. Nobody thought that was scattered. The only limits were the ones they put on themselves. I've been working from that definition ever since.