Distractions

As I sit here typing this after another long day at work (it is past midnight here) I am wondering about all the pulls on time people face in trying to achieve their goals and particularly the ones I am facing.

The are my usual ones work, family, Xbox/Wii (I have cut these out now) and all that stuff but then there are also other pulls or distractions (which I term as unwanted pulls on time, family = mostly wanted pull, Xbox = distraction).

I always want to learn new things and so I start to filter with different things, this distracts me from my original goals. There are so many other Cisco tracks Security and Voice to name a few that interest me and will pull me (or distract me) in another direction. In fact doing a lower level Cisco track in another subject like Security might actually help my career more than doing a CCIE in R&S at least at my current job. No wonder so few people who start out on the CCIE path actually finish it, it is probably not because they can't do it so much so as other things come along in the meantime (jeepers I should have been a rocket scientist for figuring this out on my own :-) ).

The reason I am thinking about this is because I may have the opportunity to take on some of the firewall stuff at work. I might be able to specialise in firewalls and make that become my thing, become the go to guy for firewalls and then use that as my opportunity to launch myself further up the corporate ladder. Or firewalls might be my distraction something that pulls me off in a different direction and leaves me in a no man's land half way between my original goal and some new place.

Thinking about this I should probably stick to the R&S track for now and distract myself as little as possible with the firewall side. I have spent enough money on R&S training materials and need to show some return on investment to my misses.

I will still have to look after Checkpoint and PIX firewalls at work. I can probably get by on the Checkpoint side with what I know already but I have no idea on PIX. I have been given two PIX firewalls and will need to be able to support them. So does anyone have any recommendations on good books about PIX that will be able to get me up and running pretty quickly without sucking up to much of my R&S study time? Also so I can better judge how far I should let this distract me, I understand PIX is end of life so would I be able to apply what I learn for PIX to the ASA stuff?