[hahajk]

On the other hand, I often do non-required things just because I'm curious and they have often been boons for my team. As an example, as a proj manager at a big org I went through the steps of setting up my own tenant account in our org's AWS system so I could play around with compute nodes. A year later they had issues with the team that managed the AWS environment and couldn't create new accounts for almost a year. As a result, no one in the org could bring on new contracts requiring cloud computing. Except my team: Our contractors could be added to my tenant account and continue work. This was a huge deal when we were trying to get a few experimental projects off the ground very quickly.

Almost all of my success has been a result of doing things no one else did because I was curious about them.