The Three Failed Restarts
It has been more than six months since I certified myself in CCNA. The plan was to take a three-month cooldown, then move up to CCNP. That cooldown stretched into something much longer.
I've already started Jeremy's IT Lab CCNP ENCOR course on YouTube three separate times. Every time, something pulled me away — work, life, or just the quiet voice that whispers "this is too much, you don't really need it."
So here I am on attempt number four. And honestly? I really hope this is the final start — the one that goes all the way to the end.
Because moving from CCNA to CCNP isn't just more material. It's a different mindset. CCNA teaches you what things are. CCNP teaches you how to design, troubleshoot, and operate them at scale. SD-WAN, advanced BGP, security architectures, automation with NETCONF and YANG. It's a steep climb.
And starting it requires more than enthusiasm. It requires a real reason.
Then I Met a CCIE
A few weeks ago I went to my university reunion. Twenty-five years had passed since we'd all sat in the same lecture halls.
One of my old classmates — Florin G — pulled me aside. He told me he works at one of the highest-paying tech companies in our country, and he wanted to know if I'd be interested in joining his team.
Then he mentioned, almost casually, that he was a CCIE.
I was stunned. CCIE — the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert — is one of the hardest IT certifications in the world. Less than 1% of network engineers ever achieve it. My appreciation for Florin grew spectacularly in that moment.
But then he told me his story. And that's the part that really stuck with me.
The Story That Changed My Perspective
Florin graduated from our university with one of the top two grades in the entire class — somewhere between 9.90 and 10 out of 10. By all measures, he was set up for success.
Except he wasn't. The local hiring market was tight, and his best offer was to stay in the university as a junior teaching assistant — for a shameful salary of around $200 a month.
For two years he kept teaching, living with his wife in campus housing. When they finally tried to move out and buy a small apartment, they went to the bank to apply for a mortgage.
They got rejected. His salary wasn't high enough.
Top two grades out of an entire university class. And the bank said his income was beneath the minimum threshold for an apartment.
Fortunately — and this is the part where luck and preparation meet — one of his students mentioned that a certain telecom company was hiring. Florin applied with low expectations. He got the interview. He got the job.
His first paycheck came in cash. He went home, sat on the bed in his campus apartment, and spread the entire pile of money across the sheet just to look at it. He couldn't believe how much someone could earn in a single month.
He never stopped improving after that. Certifications, hard projects, the long road to CCIE. Today he is one of the most valued engineers at his company, earning far more than he ever dreamed of as a student.
Why I'm Telling You This
I'm sitting somewhere on the edge of applying for that job at his company.
The salary is roughly three times what I make now. And I'm not complaining about my current job at all — it's stable, it's interesting, it gave me the breathing room to build CertAce on the side.
But three times. That's not a small difference. That's a different life trajectory.
Before I walk into that interview, I want CCNP on my résumé. Not as a vanity line. As proof — to them and to myself — that I can sit down with a hard goal and finish it.
So my journey starts now, end of May 2026, with ENCOR 350-401.
What I Learned From the First Three Failures
If I'm being honest with myself, the first three attempts didn't fail because the material was too hard. They failed because I had no system.
I'd watch a few videos when I felt motivated. Then a busy week at work would knock me off the schedule, and motivation would drain away. By the time I came back to it a month later, half of what I'd learned had evaporated.
This is the trap of self-study: motivation is unreliable, but most people treat it as the engine. It isn't. The engine is the system. Motivation is just the spark that gets you started.
So here's what I'm doing differently this time:
- A fixed daily slot — same time every weekday, no negotiations.
- Practice questions after every video — so concepts don't fade into soup the way they did with CCNA.
- A visible deadline — end of summer 2026. Written down. Committed publicly (this blog post is part of that commitment).
- Using my own tool — yes, eating my own dog food. I built CertAce because the platforms I used during CCNA didn't really teach me why answers were correct. Now I get to use the AI explanations on every CCNP question.
The Honest Part
I don't know yet if this attempt will succeed. I've started four times. The track record isn't great.
But this time the reason is different. It's not abstract self-improvement. It's a specific door, a specific interview, a specific number on a contract that would change things for my family.
And it's also this: I've spent the last year building a CCNP practice platform for other people. It would be slightly ridiculous to never finish CCNP myself.
Motivation gets you to start. A system gets you to finish. The difference between certification candidates who pass and those who don't is rarely intelligence — it's whether they had a system on the days motivation failed them.
If you're somewhere in the same place — staring at a course you've started before, wondering if this time will be different — maybe writing it down publicly is part of the answer. Maybe the public commitment is the small extra weight that tips the scale.
This is my weight on the scale. End of summer 2026. CCNP ENCOR 350-401.
I'll write the next post after the exam. Either way it goes.