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What Are You Permitting That's Preventing Your Progress?
What Are You Permitting That's Preventing Your Progress?I’ve often thought there are really two ways to improve your career as a network engineer:
Most of us automatically default to the former and ignore the latter. We’re conditioned to believe that career growth means doing more. More tools. More scripts. More certifications. More projects. But here’s the truth: the simplest, fastest path to progress isn’t addition. It’s subtraction. Here’s a simple, but uncomfortable question: What are you currently permitting that you shouldn’t? This question forces you to confront the inefficient workflows, self-defeating habits, draining relationships, and quiet compromises that have slowly crept into your work life. These don’t appear overnight. They sneak in quietly. It is called Creeping Normality in psychology which is the gradual acceptance of negative change, because it happens in such small increments that you hardly notice it at all. One day you realize:
None of it happened in a single moment. It built up slowly. Step by step, day by day, until it negatively impacted your career trajectory. The good thing is you can fight back. So ask yourself again: What am I currently permitting that I shouldn’t? Identify it. Address it. Remove it. Because the fastest path to leveling up your career as a network engineer isn’t adding more. It’s subtracting what holds you back. |
The Modern Engineer
Join 1k+ other forward-thinking professionals who receive the weekly newsletter, where I provide actionable strategies, insights and tools to escape the grind and build influential, future-proof careers. Sign up and I will send yoy a FREE copy of my 5-Stage playbook to multiply your impact and build a career that AI can't replace.
When network engineering gets hard (and it always does), most engineers retreat into one of two worlds Naive Optimism: The world where you tell yourself “AI won’t affect my role,” where every automation trend is overhyped and where the future feels safe because the past felt familiar. This mindset avoids the uncomfortable truth and clings to blind confidence. Hopeless Realism: The world where every advancement in AI feels like a threat, where every new automation tool signals your eventual...
The Tree Chopping Trap I’ve been thinking a lot about how network engineers spend their time, and I keep coming back to this metaphor that perfectly captures what I see happening across the industry. Most of us are stuck chopping down trees. Let me explain what I mean. Your day looks something like this: alerts flooding your monitoring system. A switch that’s reached end-of-life but still works fine. Other teams ask why their application is slow. Your inbox has 247 unread messages. Your Slack...
7 Lessons from Warren Buffets’ Final Letter As network engineers, we often think in terms of packets, uptime, redundancy, and scalability. But leadership lessons don’t just come from tech, they come from everywhere, even the investing world. Warren Buffett’s November 10, 2025 thanksgiving letter (his final one as CEO) offers timeless wisdom, and many of his insights map surprisingly well to how we build and operate networks. Here are 7 lessons we can apply. 1. Be Humble About Luck Buffett...