What Does It Take To Be A Success?

Ours is a quick-fix, get rich quick, one-shot success society. We go the doctor and demand a cure. We want instant success. We think we can buy a lottery ticket and become a millionaire. Is it any wonder we're not happy?

A couple of months ago I got to see a jazz-funk guitarist here in Austin that I had been following online for a couple of years. He mostly tours in the midwest, and finally got to Austin. He played on a Friday night at 10:30 to the grand total of 12 people. I loved the show, but it got me wondering about how hard it would be to tour, night after night, living in cheap motels and playing my gig in front of but a double handful of people.

Think of that star quarterback. The one that started playing football at 5. Or the basketball player drafted into the pros. Maybe dribbling since 6? Two a days in the hot summer, j.v. practice at 5:30 a.m. Practice year 'round for years. Success is so sweet because it is earned.

I am a Hadoop security consultant. I am happy to consultant to Fortune 100 companies in the U.S. Right now, Hadoop is hot. Companies big and small are adopting Hadoop because they need to be able to process their data to stay or become competitive. The two biggest barriers to Enterprise adoption of Hadoop are a lack of personnel with Hadoop skills and concerns about securing Hadoop implementation. Is it any wonder that a Hadoop security consultant would be in demand?

The route that brought me to where I am today started in 1999 when I left the USAA insurance company and started my own company. I wanted to architect clusters, harnessing multiple computers in a distributed network that would work together on problems too big for a single computer. I designed and built clusters for the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed, among others. Contracts lead to other contracts. Originally an IBM mainframe programmer, I had to teach myself Unix, C++, security, Python, MySQL, Linux, among others.

Then, in 2008, I was in an automobile accident and suffered major injuries. I spent 2008 in rehab and couldn't work, and my business was shuttered.

It took me until 2010 before I worked again, and I had to start over. I had to re-certify in security. I taught myself Hadoop. I worked for a year as a Virtualization Engineer and gained DevOps experience on a global network. I moved to Austin in 2012 to work as a Python security developer. I worked for a year developing system monitoring software for Hadoop. Finally in 2013 I was hired as a field engineer to install Hadoop on data appliances. But 2 months into that job and the contract was eliminated. So I had to move laterally and work as a Cloud developer. Finally, one year ago, I was hired to do Hadoop consulting.

I have 30 years of IT experience. For most of those years, I have been successful at my work, but it has taken me 15 years of work to get where I am today, doing exactly what I want to do. How many people are doing exactly what they want to do?

I used to have this discussion with my Mom. "Bob, most people don't get to do what they want. They do what they have to to survive." "But mom, maybe if they would want more, they would work more to do what they want." I am so grateful that I am able to do what desire to do, and I thank my mom, my teachers, God and the Great Pumpkin for making me see long ago that if I just continued to work for what I wanted that I could get it.

Now, where do I buy that lottery ticket?