In 2015, I discovered this thing called "data science." Once I realized what it was, I thought, "This is the career that I always wanted, but it just didn't exist yet!"

I was a weird kid. I would read the phone book and memorize school directories and look for patterns in the lists. In Little League, I kept stats of my exploits, calculating my batting average with a hand calculator and graphing it over time. Those were my first forays into "working with data."

Like many people who like math, I found my way into engineering at Rice. Civil, with the environmental option, for reasons I still can't explain. I've never built a bridge in my life. What it did teach me was how to learn: two nutritionally-challenged days holed up in Fondren library, turning a struggling organic chemistry grade into an A on the final. I remember thinking, if I can grok how to do that, I can grok just about anything.

I started at Andersen Consulting, where I learned that scope, timeline and resources are a three-legged stool: you can give on two, but something's got to stay constant. Wharton taught me to size an opportunity as revenue generating, cost reducing, risk mitigating, or optionality preserving. At Bayview Financial I founded and led a software development team from scratch, which turned into a lesson in how to lead and how not to lead.

I had ridden the mortgage market up and then back down. It was a roller coaster. But instead of making me nauseous, it left me feeling unfulfilled.

So I left Bayview. I call the ensuing years "my time in the wilderness." I explored. I learned through trial and error. Lots of trials. Lots of errors. Did marketing, did some investing, did a startup, did some consulting.

All those skills and things that I'd learned previously were great. But if I didn't apply them to something that I was passionate about, then who cares?

Then one day a client needed hundreds of thousands of order records joined with hundreds of thousands of customer records. My laptop crashed on the vlookup in Excel. I went looking for other tools, stumbled across this thing called "data science," kept pulling on the thread, had my epiphany, found my passion, and dove in headfirst.

It wasn't a full pivot, more like a 90-degree turn to repoint my career. A nanodegree from Udacity filled in some gaps. Founding and running the Miami Data Science Meetup, a monthly speaker series that grew to over 1,500 members by 2020, gave me direct access to smart practitioners from whom I learned a ton. I even conceived of and co-taught a course at Miami-Dade College downtown. Producing that course material and teaching the concepts clearly was as hard as anything I've ever done and required all of my grokking ability.

Around that time, I started doing it professionally with the great team at Anda. My favorite part: seeing the look that people get when I tell them something about their business that they didn't already know. That's when I know I've done my job well.