My career path makes no logical sense going forward, but a vary logical path looking back; I was a terrible student, so much so that I barely got out of high school, never mind college. I was fortunate enough though that my parents bought a "family computer" back when I was about 16 or so. This was a "Timex Sinclare" with nothing but a teeny membrane keyboard and 2k of RAM that plugged into a TV. At the time the only job I could find was selling clothes.
I used that computer day and night, then used my money to by another and another and another and so on.. Finally, I decided that I should make a career out of it, so I used my computer and a database to write a letter to every singe computer company within 50 miles of my house begging for a job - working cheap in exchange for training. It turns out the one that took me up on the deal was in my home town! I worked on a desk that was a Door on 2 sawhorses, but I learned. Thats when I was exposed to Novell, and asked to design a network connecting a major corporate Mainframe system to a PC network. This wasn't done in those days. My boss handed me the box and all 26 books and said you're installing it next month. Well, it didn't go off perfectly, but it worked. I moved into sales there and wound up unemploying myself by selling a deal too big for us to handle because we couldn't finance it.
A competitor called and asked me to work for them designing and selling networks, and I saw the writing on the wall so I jumped. I worked there for a few years selling integrated solutions (anyone remember ACT! for DOS?)
One day, a guy came in and was killing time while his kid was getting a haircut, we got to talking all about networking, midrange systems, distributed computing, blah blah.. I thought nothing more than I was just helping a guy understand technology. A few months later he called, and told me who he worked for (a BIG technology company) and said they needed someone who understood all this to help them sell midrange networked printing solutions that could also speak mainframe. I went for it.
This company also sells multi-million dollar printing equipment too. I moved up the ladder there after several years, and finally decided that we spend so much time teaching others how to succeed with this equipment, why don't *we* do it.
We took out a loan, bought a printer and went to work. Now, we're one of the largest direct mail operations in the Midwest. All because I hated school.. LOL
There is a great commencement speech by Steve Jobs of Apple Computer to the students at Stanford University. Here is the link: http://news-service.stanford.edu/new...bs-061505.html
If you read noting more than the first paragraph, you'll see how he explains that you cannot connect the dots of your life moving forward - it makes no sense at all. But in the end, if you look back, every decision you made, makes perfect sense.
Take 5 minutes and read it. It's excellent. There were times I got goosebumps.
