Excellent article, and a reflection of my own successes in my career thus far - and of recent, life in general. I'm not an SME in anything specific. The fact I

Excellent article, and a reflection of my own successes in my career thus far - and of recent, life in general. I'm not an SME in anything specific. The fact I know this, already puts me in the top 50% of IT Professionals. The fact I can identify my level of expertise in specific fields or subjects ("I know what I know, I know what I don't know, and I'm willing to admit the latter") probably bumps me into the top 25%. Even if you're a "C student" in your career, being a C student in multiple related knowledge domains will make you far more valuable than a B student in a single domain, and that's my approach to things. I'm not CKA-certified, but I can still grep what value Kubernetes brings to the Enterprise and engage with it because I did the reading. I'm not certified on any of the VMware product line, but I've built some degree of tenancy into the product without spending a dime on their Automation suite, because I did the reading, because I dove into the product line and put in the work. I'm no AWS-certified Architect, but I've moved global datacenters into AWS because I did the reading. Seriously, this comes up time and time again, but it always bears repeating: just doing the reading immediately boosts you into the upper echelons of something. Finishing a book on the fundamentals of drawing will make you a more accomplished artist than 90% of your peers. Finishing a book on photography fundamentals, or the exposure triangle itself, will make you a far better photographer than someone using their iPhone on auto. Finishing a course on a specific technology will make you more competent in it than most of your peers, even if you don't get a credential from it. Do the reading. Always do the reading. But more than doing the reading itself, you also need to apply the knowledge from reading. That's when the rubber meets the road, when reality encounters ideals and things break, fall apart, or fail. That's when you go from the top 25%, to the top 5%. From there, it's all diminishing returns, so you have to pick-and-choose what brings you joy, what sparks your passion in life, because the "easy growth" is gone. You did the reading, you put it into practice, and that's all you can do until others recognize your expertise for what it is. But you can get to that top 5% pretty quickly, and pretty easily. It just takes a little bit of reading, and some basic practice.