I have had a 40 year career in IT, watching it from almost the very start (programming in 6502 assembly) to now (working with Natural Language Processing), without a college degree. I’m proud of that. I consider myself a continuous learner.
I'm secretly building a next-gen search engine that does everything else search engines should, and does it well. Every SE is focused on optimizing search, but that's a fragment of the big game people play to find stuff. I use it daily to research and come up with new killer features. I'm proud of being user 1. When this SE is released I expect BigCo's will want to buy it, to burn it, because it shows what people should expect from a real search engine.
I jumped off a mountain with a hang-glider -- and cleared a electrical transmission line by less than my wing-span.