Today, I’m going to share a video about teapots. No, not honeypots – teapots.

Bear with me, there’s a good reason for it.

Thanks to the proliferation of inexpensive high-quality tools for video production, social media has an endless supply of people making videos about their passions. As you might expect, the quality varies, but with a little patience you can find an excellent example of content relating to anything that might interest you. Such as teapots.

Now, as a potter myself, this is a great demonstration, although he almost makes it look a little too easy – trust me, it takes a lot of practice and experience to achieve an ugly teapot, much less the art demonstrated here.

Okay, so, why am I sharing this? Have I lost the plot? Is this the wrong site? Is it just because it’s Friday? What’s my point?

In information security (or privacy, or policy development, or…) we usually look inward. What are others in our field doing? What’s the latest breach news? The newest vulnerability? The hottest controversy? Right now, everyone in the field is focused on Summer Camp – either traveling to Las Vegas for DEF CON, BlackHat, and B-SidesLV, talking about why they aren’t there, or at minimum organizing plans around the way those events will dominate things for the next week.

And that’s not so great. Our roles involve so many different skillsets and techniques, many of them involving educating, communicating with, or reporting to people who are not in our field and have no intention of ever being in it. So at least some of our time should be spent looking outward. By constantly looking in, we limit our perspective, which only makes it harder to see the ways we could improve our connection with other people.

So back to teapots for a minute. It doesn’t really matter what it is, or the form it takes, but this kind of content can dramatically improve your security program. How do potters reach their audiences? Where does it differ from your approach? What could you learn from that and apply to your own user communications?

Take some time every so often to look outward. Get a different point of view, and let it change the way you see the world you work in. You’ll benefit, your program will benefit, and who knows – maybe you’ll find a whole new passion of your own to explore.