I taught myself SQL and HTML while I was working in a hardware sales staff support role out of school… ERP software the company spent a fortune on didn’t give them the reports they needed so I figured out how to build them

Sometimes you don’t choose the life you have. It chooses you 

 Holy shit, so did I.

That was in a job while studying IT, so I'd already consciously chosen that path.

Figuring out what the customer wanted to know & them turning that into a report. I got pretty good at writing & optimising SQL.