C2 Corner: Climbing the Mountain Again and Again

Foreword

By Chris Camacho

One thing that consistently comes up in C2 Corner conversations is that cybersecurity careers are rarely linear. They are shaped by external events, market shifts, organizational change, and personal decisions that force reinvention.

I have lived that reality myself.

My career began inside some of the largest financial institutions in the world. These were environments defined by scale, structure, regulation, and accountability. I spent years building and scaling global security and intelligence teams, operating within complex governance models, and delivering outcomes where failure was not an option. Those experiences taught me discipline, clarity, and the importance of defining success early.

Later, I moved to the vendor side, where the transition to much smaller companies was a reset in itself. Things moved fast, sometimes instantly. There was less regulation, more ambiguity, and a level of chaos that comes with building while moving at speed. At the same time, my world expanded. I found myself supporting both the smallest organizations delivering meaningful impact to the world and the largest enterprises that are deeply resourced, well funded, and staffed with top talent. Learning to operate across that full spectrum sharpened how I think about scale, execution, and what success really looks like in practice.

Over time, I found myself working across nearly every function. Support. Customer success. Sales. Delivery. Partnerships. Eventually, as a co-founder at Abstract. Each role required a different perspective, but the same core trait kept showing up. Perseverance.

That is why Jeff’s story resonated with me. His perspective captures something we do not talk about enough in cyber. The discipline required to keep going, especially when circumstances reset you back to the base of the mountain. This piece reflects a mindset that has allowed many of us to adapt, endure, and continue building meaningful careers in this industry.

Climbing the Mountain Again and Again

By Jeff Lowinger

People like to describe careers in technology as ladders. You start somewhere, move up, and eventually arrive. My career has been a series of climbs, interruptions, and restarts. Every time things felt stable, something external changed the terrain: 9/11, COVID-19, industry contraction. None of these were personal failures. But each one put me back at the base of the mountain, looking up and deciding whether (and how) I was going to climb again.

At some point, I stopped treating restarts as temporary setbacks. They were clearly part of the pattern.

Early in my career, I gravitated toward technical systems like databases, networks, infrastructure. I liked environments where things either worked or didn’t, and where the reasons mattered. When I moved into project and program management, that instinct stayed but shifted. Instead of debugging systems after the fact, I was forced to answer a harder question up front: what does success actually look like here?

Program management taught me something I still rely on: don’t start moving until you’ve defined the destination. Before any real work begins, decide how progress will be measured, decide what “done” means, decide where you’ll stop and reassess if things go sideways. That discipline sounds procedural, but it turned out to be personal. When roles, companies, or entire industries reset around me, that way of thinking was one of the few things I could take with me intact.

And I had to use it more than once.

After 9/11, a layoff forced a reset I didn’t expect and couldn’t control. Years later, COVID disrupted entire industries at once, pulling the ground out from under people who had done everything “right.” More recently, contraction across tech made it clear that stability is often temporary, no matter how carefully you plan. Each time, I faced the same temptation: move fast, grab the nearest path upward, regain a sense of security as quickly as possible.

What I learned instead was to slow down just enough to be deliberate. Each restart began the same way:

Define the objective.

Break it into stages that were small enough to survive uncertainty.

Decide what I could actually control, and stop pretending I could control the rest.

Progress wasn’t dramatic, but it was measured. It was sometimes boring and often invisible to anyone but me.

This is where perseverance stopped being an abstract virtue and became something more practical. Perseverance was about maintaining structure when external validation disappeared, not optimism or grinding harder. It was about holding myself to checkpoints even when no one else was watching. The mountain didn’t get easier, but I stopped expecting it to.

Over time, I noticed that this approach held up across very different environments. Working in cybersecurity exposed me to competing priorities, shifting incentives, and constant change. Tools changed, teams changed, and expectations changed, but the same internal method applied: be clear about the goal, make tradeoffs explicit, and surface misalignment early instead of letting it linger. When things broke (and they always do) the structure made it possible to adjust without starting from zero.

Outside of work, family, friends, and professional peers mattered more than I probably admitted at the time. Support helped. But what really carried me through each reset was translating that support into action: setting realistic goals, tracking incremental progress, and letting small wins count without pretending they were final outcomes. Each summit was confirmation that the process still worked.

Eventually, I let go of the idea that there is one peak you reach and stay on. In fast-moving fields like cybersecurity, that idea doesn’t hold up. Change is the environment. The real skill isn’t avoiding resets but learning how to restart without losing your footing or your sense of direction.

What I’ve learned, after multiple climbs, is that perseverance without structure burns out, and structure without perseverance collapses the first time conditions change. The balance between the two is what makes repeated ascents possible.

I no longer see the mountain as something to conquer once. It’s just terrain I know how to navigate. When the path disappears again, and I know that it will, I know where to begin:.

Define success.

Measure honestly.

Take the next step.

Then the next one.

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