Recently i got asked the question, how did you get where you are at now? To be honest , it didn’t take me long to think about the answer. You might find the answer in the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell but I will give you the summery and a little bit more.
It started when I was 9 years old, as a smaller then average boy living in a small village called Rilland in the province of Zeeland in The Netherlands I spend my days doing mostly geeky stuff. From taking bugs home instead of playing football or playing with my microscope, if you can imagine a 9 year old geek then most likely you will find something very similar to how i looked at that age.
Now a new addition came to the house in the form of a MSX Computer. It was the year 1992 and the MSX was already 10 years old which resulted in a few problems… one of them was that the games were not made anymore ! My solution was that of roaming around the monthly flee markets in “De Zeeland hallen” in a town called Goes.
There I bought the old games and MSX magazines which were my first real study books that i found interesting. My games were made of the examples I found in the MSX magazines which often consisted of 10 or more pages of BASIC code.
Now the lethal combination of geekness , a old MSX with no games and no money to buy any newer computer and 15 years and voila you have the making of an IT Consultant.
Hence if I can give anyone an advice on how to get up and running in an IT Business, IT Services or Anything in live it is to just do it. You want to learn Linux, go ahead download debian , ubuntu ,centos and install it.. You want to do penetration testing install OpenVas and start following the security and hacker scenes . You want to learn how to build a pbx system go download asterisk and get your self a softphone installed… Everything you want to learn is available for you, just be aware that you might need to spend 15 years on it in order to fully understand it for about 1 min.. And then the information is old and you will have to study some more again.
