Two Mottos
I live by two short phrases. “Seek Always A New Horizon” came first. “Embrace The Journey” came later, and it has come to mean more to me with time. One is about where I’m headed. The other is about how I travel.
This is the story of both, and why I think they work best together.
The Student Who Couldn’t Get Saturated
At 25, I walked into Delgado Community College with a clear plan: become a nuclear medicine technologist. After a long break from education, I was hungry to learn again. I threw myself into my studies, maintaining a 4.0 GPA, completing triple the required observation hours, and earning recognition in the honors program. I was a sponge that couldn’t get saturated.
Then came the rejection. A technicality kept me out of the nuclear medicine program (I won’t get into it here). Around the same time, the medical industry announced a hiring freeze on technical roles. In a field that was already hypercompetitive, I couldn’t afford to wait another year with a young family depending on me.
So I pivoted. I changed a few classes, earned my associate degree in general studies, and went to work.
What stayed with me was something I had said during those classes: “I would be a professional student if I could.” For years it felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. It turned out to be a clue.
Seek Always A New Horizon
The long version of how I got from there to IT, including a warehouse, a real estate license, and two people who guided me, is in my post From Carpenter to Cloud Engineer. The short version is that I eventually asked myself a simple question: what kind of career would require me to keep learning for as long as I worked?
IT was the answer. It is a field where yesterday’s cutting edge becomes today’s legacy system, and where nobody ever finishes learning. For someone who had once wished to be a professional student, that was the whole appeal.
“Seek Always A New Horizon” came out of that realization. It isn’t about getting bored with one topic and jumping to the next. It’s an action statement: commit to learning, to growing, and to reaching for the next thing, whether that’s a certification, a tool, or a skill I haven’t earned yet. Right now, my next horizon is the HashiCorp Terraform Associate certification. After that, there will be another.
Embrace The Journey
A horizon has one problem: it keeps moving. You walk toward it and it stays exactly as far away. Taken alone, “seek always a new horizon” can turn into restlessness, always looking ahead and never noticing where you are.
That’s where “Embrace The Journey” comes in. It’s the other half of the idea. If the horizon never arrives, then the road is where life actually happens, and it deserves attention too.
My road has not been a straight line. A rejected application, a ladder I climbed in the wrong direction, a real estate license I earned and walked away from: each one looked like a failure at the time, and each one ended up teaching me something I needed. Failure isn’t the end. It’s a chance to start fresh with a new perspective.
It also changes how I handle the hard stretches. Finishing a degree took me three years while I worked full time and parented full time. I could have treated every slow month as lost time. Instead, I try to treat it as part of the trip.
Why They Work Together
Seek Always A New Horizon gives me direction. Embrace The Journey keeps me from rushing past everything between here and there.
If you’re someone who has ever felt out of place, who worked jobs that paid the bills but didn’t feed your curiosity, or who took a detour you didn’t plan, your path has value. The physical jobs taught me work ethic. Raising a family taught me resilience. The detours taught me that it’s never too late to turn toward what energizes you.
The horizon is always out there. The question isn’t whether you’ll reach it. It’s whether you’ll keep walking, and whether you’ll let the walk matter.
What horizons are you seeking? And what are you learning on the way there?
Originally published August 2025. Revised October 2026.