In my essay “I Wish Someone Had Told Me” I talk about getting started in IT, and how at the beginning, you are just all over the place. You are pulled into different projects, working with different teams.

And that’s the problem. Because if you keep letting yourself get pulled around, you will never settle into one area, and you will never get REALLY good at something.

What I didn’t say in the essay is that beginning – meaning starting to focus on the area that excites you most – means NOT focusing on other things. And that can be hard. It can be a challenge when you realize you no longer know every variation of every component in 3 vendor’s line of servers; or that you no longer think in code; or that all the old keyboard tricks you knew were for operating systems that are now defunct.

But that’s the price, and it’s one worth paying.