I Had a Plan to Become Fire Chief. Here’s Why Missing It Was the Best Thing That Happened.
Read Original Post | July 12, 2026
The Paper Route
I never felt particularly smart growing up.
I say that not as false modesty but as an honest accounting of how I understood myself for most of my early life. School was something I tolerated rather than excelled at. Mostly C’s in middle school. I had to maintain a 3.0 to drive in my family, so I graduated with a low 3.0 — exactly enough, not a point more.
What I did have was an appetite for work that I cannot entirely explain. It started at eleven with a paper route. Through my teenage years I worked in a cabinet shop, a race shop, doing yard work, as a clerk’s helper at a grocery store. I typically had two jobs at a time and picked up every odd job placed in front of me. Nobody told me to do this. I just could not seem to stop.
I mention this because it matters later. The work ethic was always there. The direction took longer to find.
Brazil
Before I landed in the fire service I spent two years living and working in Brazil. I did not go there for adventure or career advancement. I went, and I stayed, and I worked alongside people who by almost any American financial measure had very little.
What struck me — what I carried home and have never put down — was that they were happy. Genuinely, expressively, unperformatively happy. Not in spite of their circumstances but somehow alongside them in a way I had never seen before. It rearranged something in how I thought about the relationship between achievement and contentment. It planted a suspicion I would spend decades testing: that the destination is rarely where the good stuff actually lives.
I came home with a different set of lenses. Be humble. Listen to perspectives that don’t match yours. Treat every person with dignity regardless of where they land on any spectrum you have invented to rank them. These were not abstractions. I had seen them lived out in ways that made the alternatives look thin.
The Fire Service Ithaca
I knew from early on that I wanted to be a firefighter. I did not know how long it would take to get there.
I put myself through community college fire tech classes and the fire academy. I tested for four years before landing the full-time position I wanted — four years of waiting, continuing to work, volunteering at another department, going through three separate probations across a volunteer department, a private department, and finally a career department. While I was doing all of this I was also working for a pest elimination company, moving quickly from applicator to sales to management, which told me something about what I could do with an opportunity if one was placed in front of me.
During the fire academy, we took a personality assessment — each of us rated by our peers. The results came back and the pattern was clear. My classmates saw me as competent and intelligent. They also saw me as separate from the group. Aloof. I could see immediately why. I did not drink, so I skipped most of the social functions. I was married. I had already had a career. I was an extrovert when the situation required it and an introvert whenever I could get away with it. The assessment was accurate. I filed it away.
I was hired at Anaheim Fire at a moment when nobody had been hired for four years. The department skewed heavily senior, and seniority was currency. I got off probation and immediately tried to get onto the hazmat team — a team that was even more senior than the department at large. Having someone with barely a year on the job pressing to join that team turned heads, and not always in the direction I would have preferred.
But the hazmat team is where I learned something that no classroom has ever taught me as efficiently. The kitchen table. Those senior members would sit around and tell stories — exaggerated, ribbed, argued over, disputed — about incidents from years before I arrived. The big calls. The ones that went well. The ones where someone did something that still got brought up a decade later in a tone that made clear it had not been forgotten. I listened. Intently. Carefully. I had to earn the right to be at that table, and I knew it. I showed respect before I expected any in return. Eventually they took me under their wings, and what I got there was worth more than any credential I have ever earned.
Testing Early, Turning Heads
In Anaheim you could test for captain after five years. So I did.
This also turned heads. The pressure was real and not subtle. One of the department’s most senior and most respected captains pulled me aside. I assumed I was about to be told what I already suspected — that it was too soon, that I needed to wait, that ambition was acceptable only when it moved at the pace others were comfortable with.
He said none of that.
He told me he had become a captain young and that people had hated it. He said I would never know that now, looking at him. He said I was doing things for the right reasons and not to let them get me down.
I have thought about that moment many times since. Not because it made me feel validated — though it did — but because of what it demonstrated about the power of one person choosing to say the true thing rather than the comfortable one. He did not have to pull me aside. He chose to. That choice costs nothing and lands for decades.
I became the last captain picked up off a two-year eligibility list. Not first. Last. I mention this because the narrative of fast climbing can obscure the reality that fast is relative and the path is rarely a straight line. I tested for battalion chief three times. I was not a great test taker. I was a persistent one.
The Meeting with the New Chief
Shortly after being promoted to captain, the department brought in a new chief from outside — nationally known, which always generates its own weather system inside a department. He had not been there a month when I asked to meet with him.
We exchanged pleasantries. Then I said something like this: I want to be a fire chief. I am about to start a master’s degree. I know I have only been a captain for just over a year. But getting to that position takes planning and preparation, and I would rather start that conversation now than later. What are your thoughts?
I suspect he was thinking something along the lines of — who is this person and should they perhaps take a breath.
He gave me a roadmap anyway.
I also want to say something here about education, because it matters to the larger point. I never intended to get a four-year degree. You did not need one to be a firefighter. What I did not anticipate was that when I eventually went back to school — when I saw what I thought was the end game and was genuinely interested in the subject — I would finish my bachelor’s degree with grades in the very high 3’s and my master’s degree with a 4.0.
It turns out I was not a bad student. I was a bored one. There is a difference, and the fire service helped me find it.
The Fusion Center
After my master’s was complete, an opportunity appeared that I had not planned for and could not have anticipated.
A DHS Terrorism Fusion Center was looking for a fire service employee to lead their Critical Infrastructure Protection group. This was the first time that particular center had sought someone from fire for this role, and it was rare across the national network of fusion centers. The team I was being asked to lead was comprised of former military, law enforcement, and analysts. None of them had asked for someone from the fire service. The question of what could go wrong was reasonable.
I applied. The department agreed to the arrangement. I was selected.
My first meeting with the center director — who was my direct supervisor — he told me clearly that he did not care what I did with the group, but that whatever I did, it should not be what they were currently doing.
I will give myself very little credit for what happened next, other than this: I listened. I spent time understanding each person on that team. I identified what they were genuinely good at and got out of the way. I played to their strengths rather than trying to impose a structure that would have made sense to me but not to them.
Within less than a year, the group was recognized at the annual fusion center conference as a best practice. We presented to fusion centers across the nation. The year after that, recognition in a second area, and another round of presentations.
I did not do this by being the most knowledgeable person in the room. I did it by being willing to acknowledge that I was not.
The Balance Nobody Talks About Enough
I want to say something about experience, training, and education because the fire service has a strong and largely unexamined bias toward one of the three.
Experience is treated as the gold standard. In many ways it deserves that status. But experience is not evenly distributed. If you are not on duty or at the right station when the significant calls happen, you are not going to accumulate it the way the stories imply everyone does. I know departments where a significant portion of captains have never been on a working structure fire — not because they are inadequate, but because their jurisdiction is wealthy, the construction is new, and the prevention infrastructure works. They compensate with training and education, and they do it well.
If you wait for experience to arrive, it may pass you by. If you collect credentials without humility about what you do not yet know, those credentials will eventually embarrass you. The balance between all three — experience, training, and education — is where the best fire service leaders tend to live. In my observation, experience tends to be the loudest lobby. I am not saying the experience camp is wrong. I am saying the conversation is incomplete when only one camp is speaking.
The Destination I Did Not Reach
I did not become a fire chief.
I had planned for it. I had worked toward it. I had told a new chief in a meeting most people would not have requested that it was the goal. And then life did what it tends to do — it presented circumstances that mattered more.
Family decisions moved us out of state for the final five years of my career. The calculus changed. I made the decision that was right for the people I loved, stepped away from the trajectory I had been on, made it clear within the department that I was no longer pursuing that path, and retired after 28 years — 24 in the pension system, with a full 30-year pension requiring six more years I had decided not to stay for.
Some people were disappointed. Some did not care. And I hope — genuinely hope — there was a small group who were quietly glad, because that would mean I had become significant enough to them that my absence from a competition mattered.
Here is what I know now that I could not have known while I was still inside the goal: missing the destination was not a failure. It was a pivot. And the pivot led somewhere I could not have reached from the place I was trying to get to.
Virtual CRR and the Road That Opened
I started Virtual CRR Inc. using the skills I had earned across a career that was supposed to end somewhere else.
What has followed is something I could not have designed in advance. Connections across the fire service at every level, in ways that extend well beyond what a single department’s organizational chart allows. Opportunities to speak, to present, to be part of conversations that shape how the fire service thinks about risk reduction. A platform that has now produced over a hundred articles. A view of the field that is genuinely global.
None of that was available from inside the hierarchy I had been climbing. The chief’s office I was working toward had a specific and bounded view. The road I ended up on has a much wider one.
I will be honest about the parts that are still unresolved. Making everything I do as profitable as the work is meaningful remains an ongoing challenge. The road does not always come with the financial clarity the plan did. But the road is where the interesting things happen, and I have not found a reason to prefer the alternative.
What Tyler Gardner Got Right
Tyler’s framework — built around Cavafy’s Ithaca — argues that financial milestones are organizing fictions. You need them because without a destination you do not set out. But the destination’s job is to make you start walking. Once you arrive, it has nothing left to give you. The wisdom is in understanding this in advance, and in already knowing what the next Ithaca is before you reach the current one.
A fire service career works exactly this way.
The destination of fire chief organized years of discipline, education, preparation, and work that made me into someone capable of the pivot that followed. The destination did its job. The fact that I did not arrive at it does not cancel what the pursuit produced. If anything, everything I built chasing that destination is exactly what made the alternative possible.
Cavafy ends the poem with something Tyler quoted that I want to close with here:
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey. Without her, you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.
The road is the purpose. The destination is what makes you take the first step onto it. The person you become while walking is the actual asset — and that person, unlike the title you were chasing, goes with you everywhere.
I started with a paper route at eleven years old and no particular sense of direction.
Twenty-eight years in a fire department. A hazmat team that did not want me until it did. A fusion center where nobody expected someone from fire to succeed. A business built on the skills of a career that was supposed to end somewhere else.
The chief’s office was never the point.
The road was.
And I am still on it.
Brent Faulkner, MAM, FO, is the CEO and Founder of Virtual CRR Inc.
A retired Battalion Chief from Anaheim Fire & Rescue, Brent brings 28 years of fire service experience, including leadership in structure fires, wildland operations, hazardous materials response, EMS incidents, and specialized rescue operations. He also served 17 years on a Type 1 Hazardous Materials Response Team.
A defining moment in Brent’s career came while leading Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) efforts at a DHS-recognized Terrorism Fusion Center. There, he oversaw initiatives to safeguard critical infrastructure from terrorism, natural disasters, and emerging threats — an experience that shaped his passion for Community Risk Reduction and ultimately led to the creation of Virtual CRR.
Brent holds a Master’s Degree in Management, a Bachelor’s in Occupational Studies, and Associate Degrees in Hazardous Materials Response and Fire Science.
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