Phil: Learn and grow in the cybersecurity field

Hi, I'm Phil I'm the Chief Information Security Officer for Google Cloud, and a big part of that is, of course, cybersecurity.
So, in cyber you've always got to learn, you've always got to stay up to date for the simple reason that technology and business and the world of our, kind of digital lives is just always changing.
The online services that you use today are probably very different even just when what they were 12 months ago.
In the mid '90s, I worked on one of the world's first internet banking systems.
And essentially we were building and coding all of the security ourselves.
I remember working on the first web browsers, the first web servers, the first implementations of encryption on the Internet.
This was even before Google even existed.
And so this was the very beginning of the Internet and we were literally kind of assembling and building this and learning how to do it as we went along.
When you are first getting into cybersecurity, it's important to not get overwhelmed.
It's a very big space.
And all of us started off at where you are today.
And we had to learn into that.
At one point, I didn't know Linux, I didn't know how to program.
I didn't know various parts of other operating systems.
And I had to learn step-by-step, how all of that worked and gradually build up that knowledge over time.
And even now I still have to look things up occasionally because I don't keep everything in my head all at once and that's totally fine.
When you're approaching a new situation, you're always going to have a degree of anxiety about whether you're going to be
able to learn it quickly enough. And generally, with enough experience, you're gradually comfortable that you will.
But again, this is important to remember that you don't have to learn everything about everything all at once.
Most of the time you learn enough to be enough of value in the initial part of the process, then you learn as you go.
Start off by writing a few lines of simple code or looking at somebody else's code and trying to understand what it does and then change it a little bit and just incrementally work into this.
Build that foundation of knowledge that gives you the ability to learn other things, and I think things will stem from that.