When I was very young my parents got a computer to help my mom finish writing her Master's thesis and for my dad to use for work and to use for home accounting. I learned to program and to modify games, got into MUDs, IRC, Usenet, and all sorts of things similar to that. My parents allowed me to go to an A+ certification course when I was 11 over the summer instead of going to Bible camp, which was motivated by having the middle school IT guy as sort of a mentor. Thanks to that I got into building computers and really focused on desktop hardware, troubleshooting, and the types of things you'd now consider "helpdesk" work. I, of course, helped take care of the family computer as well.

Along the way, I had gotten into the habit of visiting the homes of people in the neighborhood and just sitting and talking with the people that lived there, almost all of whom were older retired couples or widows, and often made food at home with my mom and brought it over for lunch. I noticed that nearly all of these people had a home computer that they used for emailing their grand kids but didn't really have a lot of knowledge about, and many were in horrible disrepair (infected with malware mostly). When my parents told me I needed to get a job at 14, they figured I'd do what everyone else did and mow lawns over the summer, but instead I printed out flyers with strips to tear off and my phone number and posted them around the neighborhood advertising computer help at significantly cheaper rates than usual (I think the going rate was $100 for diagnosis and I charged $20).

The most important tool I made for myself was burning a CD that just had a bunch of free tools on it and a handful of batch scripts I wrote to help me find and remove malware. I'm eternally thankful to all the much more capable people who were kind enough to put the tools they'd made online for free, folks like Steve Gibson (GRC) and Mark Russinovich (SysInternals) made it possible for a lot of small town techs to help real people get actual value from computers in the early days.

By the end of that first summer I was on a first name basis with several small business owners in town and made four times what my school friends made mowing lawns. By the time I was in college, I had retainers for doing IT with several companies in town and leveraged it into a short-term contract through a larger contracting firm in the closest proper city, dropped out of college to do IT contracting full time, and converted that into a full-time role as a sysadmin and from that went into DevOps, and the rest is history.

I credit most of my success to having a handful of mentors and having parents who were willing to let me guide my own education, as well as the wonderful free resources that were all over on the Internet in the early days to learn anything you wanted to know about computers. I'm also incredibly lucky that something I just thought was cool as a kid turned out to create a set of skills that I could build a career on.