You either evolve or die.

It was June 2022, when I realized that I had been living live on auto pilot. My children were getting older and starting to have their own lives. It made me wonder what about my life. I was not where I thought I would be in my life. I had a lot to be thankful for. I have a family and we are all healthy, but at this point in my life I had given several years to a job that was not going anywhere. It allowed me to provide for my family, but I felt like I was stuck in an endless loop of mediocrity. I could go to work and "excel", but it required very little cognitively from me. There were times that I had to solve complex problems, but for the most part every other day was the same.

I knew at this point that I had to transition into a career that I was passionate about and I knew that was some form of technology. I had an old computer in the closet, an HP 210 desktop, and I got it out and began experimenting with it. I wanted to create something that my family would use as well and I ended up turning it into a NAS using TrueNAS Scale. It took me few weeks deploy it exactly the was I wanted and afterwards I knew that servers and computers were my passion. There is something about building and troubleshooting a complex system that inspires me. I think it is the fact that I could spend an incredible amount of time learning about any one system and there would still be more to learn. It was the exact opposite of my current career.

When I began looking for a technical career, the one thing that I consistently heard was about a skills gap in cyber security. I understood basic concepts of cyber security at this time, but did not have a ton of knowledge about it. I decided that before I was going to invest everything in this path, I wanted to research it some more. I spent the next six months reading every study guide I could get my hands on. I didn't realize at this time the vast amount of knowledge that is available online for free. I read every CompTIA study guide from A+ to CASP+, the CISSP study guide, and the CEH study guide. I knew then that if I was interested and motivated enough to read all of these study guides, this was a path worth pursuing.

I began looking at college to attend online so that I could continue to work and support my family. It was like I was finally alive again professionally.