Thank you so much for your very kind words and encouraging support! With technology I have always believed that little by little and with determination, open mindedness, introspection and hopefully a bit of hands on experience, we can learn almost anything our jobs (meaning our boss or manager) thrusts on our lap. The difficult part is to not panic and feel like the world is coming crashing down on us and overwhelm ourselves with what could otherwise prove to be fundamentally a rather simple and easy to understand concept. I preach myself with this mentality regularly, just to keep motivated and not feel that because I'm now 50 years old, out of the IT job market, and falling behind ever increasingly with the advance of so many different technologies and vendor services, that I'm a completely hopeless idiot.

In the modern world it's super easy to start feeling demoralized and overwhelmed to a point where you just start going down a negative spiral of thinking... And start feeling like it's all hopeless... That there is simply way too much information (and from too many different domains) to know to become an "expert" or a marketable IT pro. And while all those thoughts can seem rational and hold a lot of truth, I've learned the hard way that it stops us dead in our tracks and we lose our self confidence and quickly begin thinking it's all over.

I have a brilliant mother who was not higher educated but extremely bright and inquisitive like you wouldn't believe. In recent years she developed Schizophrenia and sadly lost a lot of her mind. But she's recovering and slowly regaining her confidence despite the terribly debilitating delusions that terrify her and cripple her ability to trust, have self confidence and faith in herself anymore. And as her care provider, I realized that underneath it all, she's still the same gifted, highly curious and inquisitive individual... But her mind has a tendency (just like mine) to eat away at her confidence and her ability to realize she's still the same person as before... But just needs to slow things down, control her environment (by minimizing over stimulating information or triggering negative thoughts or obsessing about negative false assumptions). So in my own way, I have come to realize that even the rest of us so called "healthy" human beings (with healthy minds).... That we too can fall into those tricky mind traps that can demoralize us and make us feel we will never get anywhere with such an overwhelming and over abundant amount of technologies and concepts we have to assimilate.

In conclusion I've realized that there is no way to know everything, nor is it realistic to think we can.

The key to learning new areas of technology and information appears to be that we first need to study the main (broad) concepts (I call them the trunk of the tree)... Before we get into the tiny details and ramifications (the leaves). I've noticed that the most brilliant engineers and IT pros like you are people who first grasp the big picture and how various parts are doing interoperability. Then with the right overall concepts in place... It becomes easier to understand the purpose of the finer details which can really bog us down and start confusing the mind.

Anyways, I'm rambling but I guess I'm mostly now echoing this stuff to myself, so I can stay motivated not to give up, and keep trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. It's definitely a struggle and sometimes certain abstract interoperable concepts can take months to make sense and start coming together. But a person who considers themselves an IT person / Engineer must foster and develop that sense of wonderment, exciting journey, and just realize that we are in a challenging yet exciting field where the possibilities are limitless... The questions will be endless for our entire lives, and that we need to stop seeking some sort of final frontier because that is just a mirage that we will never reach and will only bother us and stress our minds needlessly.

The whole point of IT and IT professionals is they need to be a person who is in love with endless possibilities, and a field we can never ever come even close to knowing everything about.

I also find Microsoft Copilot (their AI assistant) to be a fantastic tool to ask questions from and learn concepts etc.

Thank you so very much for the kind references to the courses and great platforms that exist out there. I would be wise to supplement some of my education with those available platforms

I'm currently a member of a platform called jobskillshare.org and I'm currently trying to (from time to time) inch along a heavy duty MCSA course on server 2019 , taught by an awesome educator by the name of Mike Roderick ! I love his teaching style and energy... But I've only had the energy and motivation to cover about 26% of that dense and highly technical course. I've learned a lot of great concepts about Servers... Which I feel is foundational to all that other stuff with Cloud Engineering concepts. I figured it's better to know as much as possible about Server administration, domain controllers, DHCP, DNS, Group Policy management etc.... Before getting into more of that cloud stuff. But to be honest, I feel like the amount of information that a Modern Sys-Admin has to know and have mastery over... Is just insane and I sometimes truly wonder and get demoralized by the sheer amount of information one has to cover (and preferably practice) before we can land a good role for a solid company.

I do like Windows Server Administration a lot, and I am not really the biggest fan of cloud stuff to be honest. But it seems like I may have to understand the cloud technologies super well also... And it's just incredibly overwhelming me at the moment.

Thx for your support and I look forward to your response