In order to be great, you need to have an idea what great is. A quote I use in every one of my database design presentations is by one of my non-technical inspirations, C. S. Lewis. The quote is from his book, An Experiment in Criticism. “There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.” While his point had nothing to do with managing and coding for SQL Server, the basic premise applies to just about everything you do: one must know what “good” is before you can attempt to also be good.
How we know what good looks like is almost always through a series of the inspiring people who lead us down a path. Having the right people to inspire you is very important in determining if you end up a DBA or a developer, or heaven forbid, a manager. We are shaped and molded by people along the way, starting when we are very young, leading up to the very moment we retire to sit on the porch and shoo kids from our lawns. And you, dear reader, are an inspiration to everyone you meet, either for good, or for bad, whether you like it or not.
When it comes to working with SQL Server, I have a few people who inspired me from my very start. One of my first, and still one of my primary inspirations is Kalen Delaney. I first met her in the last century, largely in the UseNet forums, and then at a few writer’s conferences that Microsoft used to put on. I wanted to write books as well as hers, and while I have yet to write a book as great, I still try. Her 2000 internals book is the only book I paid full price for, at a conference no less, and have the signed book is sitting on my shelf.
Many other people have inspired me in the SQL community in other ways. Kevin Kline has inspired me to be a chapter leader for the Nashville SQL Server user group. Patrick LeBlanc and Brent Ozar (to name a few) inspire me to be a better speaker by making it seem so effortless. Tim Ford has always amazed me as a volunteer, business man, and game show-host (along with being an awesome co-author of our book on DMVs).
There are many more that I don’t have bytes to cover, but I have a new inspiration who is a large name in the SQL Community, Catherine Wilhemsen. Not because of some success she had, but because of a failure she encountered that is similar to one a lot of speakers have had (including myself). The difference is that she wrote about it. I won't reiterate the failure (read here for that, but I have personally experienced similar failures at times, with no snow covered scapegoat around), but if she can fail, and tell 100s or 1000s of people about it, wow. I was inspired by her blog. If she (and others I knew in the comments of that blog) had that happen, then my past embarrassments sting a bit less.
Not all inspirations will come from the SQL community. Your parents, teachers, coworkers at Wendy’s, and friends were all a part of what makes you what you are. Some of them were positive influences, some were bad influences, some were influences by not being around or existing in the first place. There are no grade school classes on being a DBA, and not many colleges offer DBA classes either. Let’s face it, something inspired you to become a DBA, or if you are an accidental DBA, something inspires you not to change career paths to something else.
Some inspirations are just simply people you look up to for some reason other than their technical skills. My wife inspires me with how hard she works and cares about what she does, even if she sometimes gets burned out by it. When I am tired and feeling like it is all too much and just want to give up and take a long nap under a rock somewhere, I draw inspiration from a few musicians such as Paul McCartney, Roger Daltrey, and Mavis Staples. Not only are they amazingly talented, but these are people in their 70s who can get up on a stage for hours singing loud and bringing the house down. If they can do it, so can I. (Which coincidentally was the exact phrasing a person recently said when they passed me on a hiking trail one afternoon as I struggled along in the opposite direction from the end of the trail.)
Be careful that an inspiration doesn’t start to become a hero. Inspirations are just people, and they will often behave in ways you will not like. They may not believe like you believe. Some people who are inspirations in a positive way, may inspire you to do better than them in other ways. Two things are for certain, first, you wouldn’t be who you are without the inspirations you had. Second, your future will be heavily affected by who you are inspired by, so be careful as you choose your inspirations. That database system you will manage in the future depends upon it.
Along these lines, one thing that often concerns me with people is they feel the need for their inspirations to look and be like them. As I wrote about in my blog: What Counts for a DBA – Blindness, people are people, and if you didn’t know what someone looked or sounded like, you can still be inspired by them. I try to forget about everything about a person except the way they inspire me. Real life inspirations that have real experiences that other people can associate with…these are the inspirations we need most.
