I used to work with this guy. He was awesome. He was aggressive. Sometimes he was a flat-out jerk. But I looked at his continual successes and never seemed to grasp WHY he was successful and why I was significantly less successful than he was in our organization. I thought ‘Oh, he probably just learned how to do this in college’! Nope turns out he just worked at a college before here – never graduated from there.

Hmm.

Maybe he just knew this stuff innately?

Maybe he’s just better than me?

Turns out he had been reading some books and thought it would be clever if he could reuse a protocol name to be something that he thought would be a great way to remember. Typically SNMP stands for ‘Simple Network Management Protocol’, but not for my colleague. For him it stood for:

‘So Not My Problem’.

You see – as I think of it, he was laser and mono-focused on achieving his goals. And he didn’t let other peoples’ priorities get in-between him and the goal line. Sure there would be setbacks by being re-tasked by management, but as I thought about it – He didn’t fail to meet goals hardly ever. Honestly – thinking back – I can’t think of a project he was in charge of that slipped timelines.

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