Your dream job - you need to grab it - nobody's going to just give it to you

This will be short. It's late, but felt like sharing a piece of motivational advice since this is true and coming from my own story.

I work in the investment finance industry for an asset manager who has a few 10's of billions of assets under management. We're lean, about 110 employees currently. There was this push to get more data oriented. The ops guys spent a ton of money on new data software and took 2 years building out the back end infrastructure with the software vendor. I was hired and came into the company about 1 year into that project. I was on the sideline most of the time while the back end was being built - the data model and data warehouse part of it. Once they were ready to start adding in some user interface and report building layers into the project, I felt now was the time, I had to jump in and take ownership. Nobody asked me to. I sort of budded my way into asking the top managers to involve me in any demos that the vendor provides. I was persistent. I knew the top managers were busy with a ton of other things. This was my time to shine. The software was not as intuitive as my managers thought it would be. I asked to get it installed on my computer and started fiddling around with it. I had no exposure to it before. It was Microsoft Power BI. I quickly jumped online and plowed into a bunch of tutorial material that thankfully existed. Microsoft was doing monthly updates (and still is) and was providing Youtube vids of all the features. Every day I would watch these videos on my commute into the city. I'd then incorporate the features and techniques that I saw in the vids back into my reports that I was building while fiddling with the data model that our vendor had helped build out for us. I was finding data discrepancies and gaps in our data. I was finding that we didn't have the data or measures (calculations) that we thought we had. I worked with our vendor to communicate the gaps and got them to provide the data fields we needed or even missing data. After that I built a few sample reports and dashboards that made their way before the eyes of the founding partners of the firm. Point of this longer than intended story is if you see an opportunity that you are interested in, don't hesitate, go grab it and dive in head first. Show passion and commit to it. Work hard. And you will be recognized, it will pay off, and you'll definitely see that it was worth it.

Good night people!