Incidents are the only time my brain works as advertised. Everything sharpens. The noise drops out. I can hold six threads without writing any down. People who’ve only seen me in a crisis assume that’s how I operate.
I don’t. The same brain that runs clean at 2 AM will lose a coffee cup between the kitchen and my desk. It took me years to realize both are the same feature.
The crisis is the easy part
Interest drives this wiring. Incidents deliver urgency, novelty, and real consequence at once. That’s why so many people wired this way end up in security operations, emergency medicine, and journalism. The field self-selects for brains that come alive under pressure.
Nobody warns you about the inverse. The rest of the calendar doesn’t trigger the same signals. Risk register updates. Policy reviews. A vendor questionnaire sitting open for nine days. To this brain, those tasks don’t feel boring. They stop existing.
Early in my career I treated that as a character flaw and tried to fix it with discipline. Discipline costs this wiring more than it pays out.
Build the scaffolding, keep the engine
What actually worked was treating my own brain the way I’d treat any system in a security program: don’t rely on heroics, build controls around the known failure modes.
The boring work gets external structure because internal motivation refuses to show up for it. Deadlines with another human attached, because a promise to myself is negotiable. A promise to a client is not. The task written down the moment it appears, because “I’ll remember” is a lie my brain tells with total confidence. Big shapeless projects broken into pieces small enough that starting one doesn’t feel like an impossiblity.
None of that is productivity-guru novelty. The difference is knowing why it’s non-negotiable for me. Someone else can skip the scaffolding for a week and wobble. I skip it and things quietly fall off the earth.
The part I’d tell my younger self: stop spending effort trying to become someone who loves the maintenance work. Spend it building the structure that gets the maintenance done. Save the engine for the moments it was built for. My clients don’t need me to be average at everything. They need the person who is calm when things are on fire and has a system making sure the unglamorous work happened during all the months when the phone didn’t ring.
If this is your brain too
You’re not broken, and you’re not lazy. You’ve just been grading yourself against a brain you don’t have. The field needs people whose wiring runs toward the fire. Just don’t let anyone, including you, pretend the fire is the whole job. Build the scaffolding for the rest of it, without apology, and let the crisis brain do what it was built for. It makes you very good at the worst hour of someone’s year.
I lost my coffee cup twice while writing this…
