Well I was homeless.

I met a couple at a board gaming store , and they decided to take me in and let me stay with them. I got a job at Sams Club and moved into my own place sleeping on the carpet. Eventually that same couple helped me get a job working an entry level position for a major company working nights monitoring their systems.

Since I worked the night shift, any time an alert would fire we would have to wake up someone at like 3am in the morning. There were a bunch of false alarms and I was getting really tired of feeling bad about waking these poor engineers up for no reason, so I started learning the tool that was used for monitoring.

Eventually I reversed engineered the tool well enough that I was able to rewrite the alerts and make new alerting/dashboards. This got me promoted to another much better position within the company. With more time on my hands to concentrate solely on the tool, I got the first certification for it. This led to the tool engineers inviting me to go to a conference for the monitoring tool with them.

At the conference I networked with a bunch of engineers, and they gave everyone at the conference $5000 worth of online training credits. I used these credits to get certified up to admin level. Then using the contacts I made I applied at a position as a PS consultant for installing the monitoring tool.

And here we are.

Went from like 8/hr to over 6 figures in 4 years.