The greatest lesson I ever learned was that I could do so much more than I thought. I was taught this by Jon, my boss at a small datacenter I worked at in high school. Jon constantly pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I’ll forever be grateful for the lessons he taught me.

As a 16-year-old being given the opportunity to do network engineering part-time, I was just grateful to have a job that I enjoyed. I quickly picked up Linux and networking basics, but it was soon on to the next thing. Once I picked up one skill, I was given a new assignment with higher complexity. This process of laddering never ceased.

Most of the time, I didn’t believe that I could do the next task, but Jon had an almost maniacal belief in me. This belief gave me no choice to but to push myself into learning and getting the job done. I’d be at client sites with broken networks and no choice other than to fix the issue. I’d be staring down borked libvirt configurations with no choice but to figure out the right hardware options. Over time, I grew to love this feeling - the feeling of never knowing the answer, always having to work to figure it out.

I now crave this experience. I want to constantly push myself into more difficult work, and I want to excel in that work. In part, this is out of a love for the process, but it’s also out of a feeling of obligation. I feel that I’ve seen through a one-way door; I can’t go back to not pushing myself when I know how much more I can accomplish.

The challenge is that nobody will ever push me as hard as Jon did. I’ll never have someone with that maniacal belief in my abilities, so in his place, I have to push myself. I hope that I can one day pass on the favor to someone else.