It is often hard to see a “career” when you first start out, because you have a job primarily to just pay the rent and to eat. This is especially true if you didn’t take the college track. I did not take the higher education track myself. I was disabused with schooling after high school because of trauma with a teacher that impacted everything.
So I chose the military. First hitch, I went for a high level opportunity, the Presidential Honor Guard. It was prestigious, but that wasn’t why I went. I loved to perform, and that is what the role entailed. But it included discipline. It also included a top secret clearance. So for my first four years of working, I left with discipline, a solid knowledge of how to dress to impress, and a clearance that ensured people knew I was a high integrity person.
I fell into retail sales after that 4 year hitch though, and it was at a time you could make commissions that were respectable. But after about two years, things were difficult. I had a health issue I didn’t know I had, and it derailed everything. I actually ended up homeless. By that I mean I was couch surfing, living in my car, staying at a shelter for a few months, and camping out. So I went back into the military. But at that point, I realized I didn’t have the skills I needed to make real money.
So this time, I took advantage of every single class I could while not on duty. I finished most of my associates degree in just one year. Then when I did get out, I went to a community college and finished it. That was a massive upgrade in my career. I went from making about $20K to 50K in one year. Knowing that was the 90s, adjust as you will for today’s money.
But from that point forward, the tone was set. If my job offered ANY educational benefits, I took them. I took college courses obviously, but more interestingly I took technical certifications for products my company sold. One of those classes was a “badging” class. How to make an ID for a company’s security system.
The reason that class is interesting is that it taught me to work with images. Which I dug into much deeper with other self study and efforts. I learned how to use “SnagIt” and Paint, then Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, and GIMP. These led me to get into 3D gaming engines and I learned Milkshake. These let me build rooms and game levels for games like Half Life.
This may seem fanciful. But it had an odd outcome. I had an idea about security systems where you could create a 3D image of a building for emergency responders. The idea being that if a fireman was in a building, had a heads up display inside his visor, he could load a 3D image of the building to know where he was during a fire. In a smoke filled building, this could be invaluable.
It led me to learning more and more about how to determine proximity of things within a building. I learned a ton about networking and how to position with a triangulation of router antennas, as well as using RFID tokens and transponders to determine where someone was. This was all in 1999. So I found all of this fascinating. There was no “class” for it, but I let my imagination guide me, and said, “if this is a logical idea, I need to learn more about “that” tech to make it happen”.
As a result of all of this, I was always popping with ideas for the products my company sold, and some of them even came true. Long term though, I got noticed by someone at Computer Associates because I was coming up with all these ideas. I helped write a product specification for something that didn’t yet exist, and ultimately, I helped create a protocol for how that would work. This influenced a lot of items, including the “common access card” that the military uses today.
I migrated eventually to other areas in Cyber Security, but that physical security grounding gave me a unique perspective that shaped my career. I kept on certifying though. I ended up with 6 or 7 Access Control product certifications, about 5 CCTV/Video Management System certifications. I also certified on a ton of Cyber Security platforms. Then I achieved my CISSP, CTPRP, and a few other industry level certs.
All of these led me to a long term solid career. It wasn’t until 2012 that I achieved my bachelors. I did one class at a time, fully paid by my employers until the last three classes. I just got impatient and paid outright for all of them. Got it finished, and moved to a new chapter in my career. (Getting that degree was the transition to Cyber Security in fact.)
Since then, I have continued the certification path, and went back for a masters in data science because of this AI wave. I took the first few classes and dropped it because they were so far behind where I was with my informal training. Then I decided to dig more deeply into AI. That was almost four years ago as of this writing (August 2026).
I have since taken three or four education cycles on prompt engineering, as well as digging deeply into using AI to build things. I keep working at it, despite being 58 and having long periods of layoff after Covid. I invest my own money to build that skill set through AI subscriptions. So far this year I have attempted to build five software products. Some matured well, and then I transitioned into other products. Turns out that there are problems with vibe coding that slow you down.
The biggest thing I learned through all of this is to never give up on education. It isn’t about spending money on it as much as investing in yourself. Every hour I invested in studying, branching out into side topics that were related, the more competent I became at everything I did. This lead to confidence, and to the willingness to take risks.
The biggest risks I took were to step off from work that I didn’t want to do, to move over to things I did like. I didn’t always have work I liked, but I looked it all as a stepping stone to get where I wanted to be. Every day climbing takes you closer to the top of the mountain. Every mountain top I reached helped me see other peaks to climb.
When learning becomes a hobby, it is joyful and satisfying. It also has the fringe benefit of leading to higher and higher income. Better work, and happier circumstances. If you chase work purely for money, just to pay rent and eat, it isn’t enough. But if you allow yourself to learn and grow organically, and dive into curiosity driven learning, you find your life giving back riches that have nothing to do with income or assets.