Step by Step

Saturday was a lovely day at the Ford household. The skies were utterly cloudless, and after the miserable ice storm Austin suffered through earlier this year, it’s especially good to be enjoying the outside world. The constant buzz of chainsaws has finally drawn to a close, and massive trucks armed with mechanical scoops are grabbing piles of broken wood stacked high on the roadsides and carting it away. Even the birds seem happy, greeting my morning routine with waves of song. Life is returning to normal, and I am glad.?

In particularly good spirits, I decided a treat was in order, so before my morning walk, I threw on the hot tub attached to my pool, and came back looking forward to a nice hot soak.?

As I plopped down into the water, content with the world, I realized one after effect of our weather that I had forgotten: so many Oaks had dropped their spring leaves, and as the tub was underneath an especially lovely Live Oak, there was a fair smattering of leaves in there, bobbing about. If I’d been planning ahead more mindfully, a quick once over with the pool net would have done the job, but once cocooned by the warmth, the idea of jumping out into the cool air wasn’t appealing.

“Sorry about the foliage here, Nancy” I commented, as I threw the leaves that bobbed past me out of the tub, one by one. With a cheerful laugh, she remarked that I was fighting a losing battle, so why bother? So many leaves, we’d never make a dent in them this way. Stubbornness is one of the gifts bestowed upon my brain from birth, so my response was to just continue, grabbing each oak leaf as it bobbed past and casting it back onto the pool deck.?

I think the act of finishing my PhD thesis was the first time I really recognized that any task could be broken down from astronomical to manageable steps, and that the key to winning was to just keep moving forward, one step at a time.

What was surprising was that after what seemed like only a few minutes, leaves were becoming more of a rarity. I couldn’t just mindlessly pluck them from streams the bubbling jets were stirring up - I had to pay a bit more attention, and reach further afield. By the time we exited the pool, the hot tub was pristine with nary a leaf in sight. Once again, I was reminded of the astonishing power of steady and slow progress when faced with a seemingly impossible task.

Of course, my little morning adventure isn’t the first time I’ve experienced the impossible falling to the steady. I think the act of finishing my PhD thesis was the first time I really recognized that any task could be broken down from astronomical to manageable steps, and that the key to winning was to just keep moving forward, one step at a time.

This is good advice and something I dole out freely to friends and family (whether they ask or not… what can I say, I’m a work in progress!): break down your insurmountable task and just deal with the pieces right in front of you. Before you know it, you’ll be done. I said this to a friend the other day, over a morning coffee. He’s had a book bubbling away in his head for some time, and I was encouraging him to complete it. No matter the hurdle, could he put 500 good words a day down on paper? Do that for a year, and even including a two week writing holiday and weekends off, you’ll have a book.?

It’s now been just over a year since Praetorian launched Chariot (see our launch day blog from 2022). I’m sure we’ll say something official on the company blog over the next few weeks (lots of exciting things are happening), so instead of focusing on the progress we’ve made (which is mighty!) I’ll instead focus on how we got things done… step by step.

When Chariot launched it was a good product, and provided real security value to our customers. Every week - really every day - since that launch day we’ve been buffing and polishing it, increasing the number and type of vulnerabilities it can identify and expanding the number of assets it can find. All the low-hanging fruit has been scooped up, and the yearly change looks utterly unrecognizable compared to the drip of daily improvements we’ve lived through. How can so many seemingly small steps lead to such a wonderful journey? It’s easily done, it seems, through the power of continuous progress.?

It’s particularly impactful to me today as I’ve been looking at things I want to build in the next year, and some of them feel hard enough technically that it’s easy to fall into the “impossible” trap, where the mountain looks so big, I don’t even want to try to get up it. While I can see the next step, I can also see a climb fraught with impossible crevasses and falls. There are some gaps in the science I don’t know how to cross, but darn it, I’m going to get to that summit because I know that as long as I can see the next step, and, most importantly, as long as I actually take it, I’ll get there. After all, I’m not climbing alone: I’m busy climbing with the best group of climbers I’ve ever met. Labs, ML, Engineering, Services - the technical bench here is amazing. Between us, we can get it done.?

Every time the going gets tough, then, I’ll remind myself of leaves in a hut tub. One leaf at a time, and eventually we’ll get there.?