David Bisson (@DMBisson) of TripWire writes in his article, "8-Year-Old CEO Reuben Paul Proves that Kids are the Future of Cybersecurity":
There is a lot of buzz going around about Reuben Paul,
an 8-year-old who at such a young age is already very knowledgeable
about information security.
Last month, Reuben delivered a talk at DerbyCon on what kids can
teach adults about infosec. He has since given the opening keynote
speech at this year’s (ISC)2 Security Congress and the closing keynote address at the 2014 Houston Security Conference.
If that weren’t enough, KEYE CBS News in Austin produced a cover story featuring Reuben and Prudent Games,
a company that designs and develops educational apps and games to teach
math, science and cybersecurity, for which Reuben serves as CEO.
Though he writes solely on his experience learning
jazz, pianist and composer Bill Evans certainly has a message to impart
to IPians with his words below: (The man pictured is Bill Evans. This
image was located on tumblr.com. Kildonan and its IP program do not claim any ownership to this photo.):
The whole process of learning the facility of being
able to play jazz is to take these problems from the outer level in, one
by one, and to stay with it at a very intense, conscious-concentration
level until that process becomes secondary and subconscious. Now, when
that becomes subconscious, then you can begin concentrating on that next
problem, which will allow you to do a little bit more.
I don’t consider myself as talented as many people
but in some ways that was an advantage because I didn’t have a great
facility immediately so I had to be more analytical and in a way — that
forced me to build something.
Most people just don’t realize the immensity of the
problem and, either because they can’t conquer it immediately, think
that they haven’t got the ability, or they’re so impatient to conquer it
that they never do see it through. If you do understand the problem then you can enjoy your whole trip through.
People tend to approximate the product rather than
attacking it in a realistic, true way at any elementary level —
regardless of how elementary — but it must be entirely true and entirely
real and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire
problem than to take a small part of it and be real and true about it.
To approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives you a feeling that
you’ve more or less touched the thing, but in this way you just lead
yourself toward confusion and ultimately you’re going to get so confused
that you’ll never find your way out.
It is true of any subject that the person that
succeeds in anything has the realistic viewpoint at the beginning and
[knows] that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a
time and that he has to enjoy the step-by-step learning procedure.
They’re trying to do a thing in a way that is so general [that] they
can’t possibly build on that. If they build on that, they’re building on
top of confusion and vagueness and they can’t possibly progress. If you
try to approximate something that is very advanced and don’t know what
you’re doing, you can’t advance.
There is a lot of buzz going around about Reuben Paul, an 8-year-old who at such a young age is already very knowledgeable about information security.
The whole process of learning the facility of being
able to play jazz is to take these problems from the outer level in, one
by one, and to stay with it at a very intense, conscious-concentration
level until that process becomes secondary and subconscious. Now, when
that becomes subconscious, then you can begin concentrating on that next
problem, which will allow you to do a little bit more.