Before I hand this over, I want to tell you where I’m actually standing right now.

I’m looking at the biggest mountain yet: building our hospital’s own ERP and EMR — the systems that run the business side and the medical records side of the whole place. That’s usually the job of specialized companies, and it’s tangled up with outside regulators too. Nobody knows how long it’ll take. I’m assuming at least three years.

Honestly, it feels overwhelming.

The size of the fear hasn’t changed. My grip on it has.

Here’s the strange part. That overwhelmed feeling isn’t unfamiliar at all. A year ago, staring at a blank screen and not knowing what code even was, I felt exactly this lost. What’s different isn’t the size of the fear. It’s that I now know what to do with it.

Get curious, look it up. Look it up, a direction shows up. See a direction, find a method, and just start. Fail, and you’ve learned something. Succeed, and you move to the next thing. That loop is the only thing that ever carried me anywhere, and it’s the same loop I’m running at the foot of this much bigger mountain.

Right now the wall isn’t technical

The thing I don’t know isn’t code. It’s other departments.

I moved from the treatment room to the planning office not long ago, and I still don’t really know how the other departments do their work. You can’t automate what you don’t understand. So before anything else, I’m doing the one thing that actually comes first: listening. Hearing what people in the field actually need, what’s grinding on them, and figuring out the shape of a fix together, one conversation at a time.

I’ve noticed something before, more than once: problems that look completely different from the outside — counting a stack of forms, tracking down misplaced supplies, sorting a pile of ID cards — usually reduce to the exact same shape underneath. Make the pile of things findable. I suspect the same pattern is waiting inside every other department too. I just haven’t looked yet.

That’s how I expect to keep growing. And when I grow, the whole place grows a little with me. In the end, none of it was really for me — and I don’t expect this next mountain to be any different.

Now I’m actually handing this to you

If you’ve read this far, some quiet part of you may have already thought: what if me too?

Don’t let that thought just pass by.

I’ll say it one more time, plainly: I’m not special. No degree in this, no bootcamp, no certificate. All I had was an inability to tolerate waste. That turned out to be enough. You’ll wander at first — that’s normal. You’ll go down one path, hit a wall, double back, try another. Don’t be afraid of that part. Every wandering path, gathered up later, becomes your own map. That’s exactly how I found mine.

So here’s the only question that actually matters:

What’s the one repetitive, tedious thing that bothers you every single day?

Start there.

I don’t know yet how this next mountain goes either. If you want to find out as it actually happens, that’s what the rest of this is for.

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