The path was never straight. The pattern underneath it was.
For most of my childhood, I thought I had a plan.
I would go to the University of Missouri, study communications or journalism, and find a life somewhere around writing. There was also a version of the plan where I became a professional baseball player and followed George Brett all the way to Cooperstown. I was a pretty good ballplayer. I was not remotely that good. Childhood plans do not always concern themselves with evidence.
Then, when I was twelve, a kid brought a guitar to summer camp. He played Sweet Child O’ Mine, the girls gathered around, and I decided I would return the next summer with a guitar of my own. That plan did not work either. I found my mom’s old guitar in the basement, took lessons, learned Smoke on the Water and the theme from Spy Hunter, and arrived at camp nowhere near ready to sweep anyone off her feet.
But I kept playing. I formed a hard rock band when I was fourteen. We wrote songs, won a battle of the bands, played a few shows, and recorded a demo tape. Before I turned eighteen, I had been pushed out of the band I started.
Plans change.
After high school, I took college classes in writing, music theory, and movies. Maybe I would become a screenwriter. Then my father died in the spring of 1996. I was eighteen. He was fifty. School stopped feeling important, my grades fell apart, and whatever path I thought I was following disappeared beneath me.
I did not suddenly discover a perfect new plan. I looked for the next thing that still seemed possible.
Computers had been part of my life since I was around ten, but I had never treated them like a career. They were where I tinkered. They were fun. When almost everything else at school was going badly, I took classes in Microsoft Office and Visual Basic and made a couple of B’s with the same effort that had been producing D’s and F’s elsewhere. I remember thinking, I might be onto something here.
Then I met Java.
Object-oriented programming changed the way I saw the world. I could picture software spatially. Data had shape. Systems had relationships. Algorithms stopped feeling like a list of instructions I had to drag myself through and started feeling like structures I could walk around inside. For the first time, something clicked in a way I could not ignore.
That did not make the road easy. During the dot-com boom, companies wanted experience or a diploma and I had neither. I fixed computers under the name Compu-Doc and chased programming, hardware, networking, and even Unix work. Before one interview, I bought Unix for Dummies and read it in the parking lot. The company liked me, but suggested I volunteer to get experience. I had bills to pay, so I declined.
In 1999, I made another plan. I would leave my job, move back to my hometown, buy a house, and complete a three-year Computer Information Systems program. This time I was an A student. I made the Dean’s List nearly every trimester and was on track to graduate Magna Cum Laude. I imagined landing on a Java team at a large engineering company. It felt like the plan had finally settled down.
Two trimesters before graduation, two friends kept trying to recruit me into a small ticket company. I kept saying no. I did not know what a ticket broker was, and it did not look like the future I had pictured. Then the dot-com bubble burst. Graduates who had expected strong development jobs were finding help desk work or nothing at all. I got nervous, called my friends, and asked whether the opportunity was still there.
I walked into the interview and told the owner that hiring me would be one of the best decisions he ever made. I asked for more money than my friends were making and promised I would be worth it. I also told him I could only work thirty hours a week until I finished school.
He hired me.
If my memory is right, I started July 16, 2001. Nearly everyone who knew I was coming was away at a conference. I found a spare computer, built it into something I could use, introduced myself to people, asked what they needed, and started solving a problem.
That part has repeated through most of my career. The title changed. The company changed. The industry changed. The plan changed more times than I can count. Sometimes I stayed too long. Sometimes I bet on people who did not bet on me in the same way. Sometimes loyalty opened a door, and sometimes it kept me standing in a room after I should have left. There were successes, disappointments, promotions, sales, new teams, side businesses, and several moments when I was sure I was finally about to follow the clean path forward.
There was never a clean path.
What I can see now is that the plans were never the most consistent part of the story. The pattern underneath them was.
I build. I solve problems. I walk into unclear situations, find the pieces, and try to make them work together. I did it with computers as a kid, with music as a teenager, with software in the ticket industry, with data and automation across other businesses, and eventually with Transcendent Software, CoffeeBreak, and Open Jibo Cloud.
That does not mean every turn was the right one. Adaptation is not the same as wisdom, and persistence is not always the same as progress. Part of getting older is learning that finding a way forward also means deciding what should not come with you.
Today, I am betting on myself again. The plan is different from the one I had at twelve, eighteen, twenty-three, or even a few years ago. It will probably change again. I hope it does. A plan that never changes is usually a plan that has stopped listening to reality.
The goal is not to find my way back to an old plan. It is to find my way back to the part of me that knew what to do before the titles, expectations, and detours made everything complicated.
Find the problem. Build something useful. Keep going.
Plans change. The work continues.
