life quest

Why I’m Gradually Retiring from Teaching Live Online Classes

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I really love Mexico. I love the people, the vibe, the food, the tequila, the beaches, you name it. If I had to pick just one place that’s my happiest place in Mexico, it’d be Cabo San Lucas at the very southern tip of the Baja peninsula, where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Cortés, aka the Gulf of California. Over the years after a lot of visits to Cabo, my favorite beach became the quiet, private Playa Solmar at the very southern tip of Cabo, next to the Arch. Mama sea turtles climb ashore, dig a hole, and…
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Epic Life Quest: Level 15 Completed.

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Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant tasks, I level up. Yesterday, we finished off another 5 tasks for Level 15, and this feels like The Iceland Level. We moved to Iceland in January 2021, and we treated it as half vacation, half work. I alternate my time in sprints between work and play: 2-3 weeks in a rental…
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His name is Helmut.

Epic Life Quest: Level 13 Completed.

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Childhood dream achieved When I made the decision to stop having consulting employees, a big part of that was being able to be flat out gone for longer periods of time. In a tiny 4-5 person business, it’s challenging (but by no means impossible) for 2 of the team members (Erika & I) to simply disappear for a month at a time. We could have done it by adapting how the company worked, I know, but that’s a matter for that other blog post – this is about my Epic Life Quest, and here, the company change manifested itself in…
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Brent Ozar in Iceland 2019

Epic Life Quest: Level 12 Completed.

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Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up. Here’s what I completed this last round: Ride the Isle of Man TT mountain course – it’s a well-regarded, scary fast race through one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen. On my Sept 2018 visit, I took a morning to ride along on a motorcycle through the route. Completed Sept 2018. Acquire an existing web site –…
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Epic Life Quest: Level 10 Achieved.

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Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up. In the last level, I focused a lot on passive income: building training that I could sell, and then getting that educational material out to as many people as possible. That paid off in this level because the passive income gave me more time to focus on other…
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Building the BrentOzar.com 2017 Black Friday Sale

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In 2013, just for fun and with almost no forethought, I announced the company’s first Black Friday sale. I figured that I love shopping for Black Friday deals online, and maybe other SQL Server people would get a kick out of it too. The first year was mostly for fun, but it turned out people loved it. I put more and more thought into it in over time, like starting the sale earlier (because a lot of corporate folks wanted the ability to get in on it, but getting pricing approved at midnight on Black Friday wasn’t gonna happen.) Gradually,…
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Epic Life Quest Task: Setting the Summit Pre-Con Attendance Record

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When Erik and I got a PASS Summit pre-con this year, I asked Alison and Leeza a question out of morbid curiosity: what was the pre-con attendance record? They reported that 7 pre-cons since 2012 have gone over 200 attendees, and the record was 269. I figured that would be really hard to beat, especially given that word on the street is that Summit attendance is down overall due to the Halloween scheduling. To make matters worse, I keep hearing “thought leaders” say that database work is dead, and the magic cloud is going to solve everything. Would there be…
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Epic Life Quest: Level 9 Achieved. Let’s Talk About Passive Income.

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Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up. When I became the sole fella in charge at Brent Ozar Unlimited® back in fall 2015, running the company dominated my calendar for a while. I struggled with trying to grow the consulting company, then ended up laying off half the staff. Once I stopped trying to grow consulting,…
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Epic Life Quest: Another million dollars.

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Teaching in Portland, 2016 In my Epic Life Quest, sometimes I post [Redacted] achievements. It’s stuff that I’m really proud of, but I’m not quite ready to talk about publicly yet. The last one was hitting the $1mm/year total revenue mark. A while back in Level 7, I wrote: [Redacted] – I set a revenue goal for our company’s online sales (training classes & videos), and we crossed it. I’m not sharing the goal publicly yet, but I’ll circle back in a couple/few years and blog about it in my Life Quest category. Completed September 2015. It’s been a while now, so let’s un-redact that and…
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Epic Life Quest: Level 8 Achieved.

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Following Steve Kamb’s lead, I treat my life as a video game with a series of levels. Whenever I unlock five new achievements, I count it as a level-up. Company retreat in Napa Valley Level 8’s 5 new achievements: Pass 50,000 Monday email subscribers. The Brent Ozar Unlimited mailing list has over 70,000 subscribers, but it feels pretty magical to know that over 50,000 folks want our favorite links in their inbox every Monday morning. Completed February 2016. Tour a winery in Napa, California. The Brent Ozar Unlimited team went to Napa for the 2016 company retreat and had a blast. My favorite…
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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

My current car collection includes a Jaguar XKR-S, Porsche 944 Turbo, Porsche 356 Speedster replica, and a Ferrari 328 GTS.

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