The creative component of a system administrator as a movement towards self-education?

Question

System administration

Perhaps the question below will seem crazy, since it's already morning, but I'll ask anyway.
There are many IT professions in the world.
Let's take a programmer as an example - in order to gain experience and knowledge, without losing motivation, he needs to program - he can make his favorite program that he dreamed of, sitting at night, not closing his eyes, forgetting about food, as he very passionate about this incredible process; designer - modify old icons, come up with a logo, signs, fonts, etc. - similarly.
This also includes an interface designer, an artist, an illustrator, a 3D modeler, a layout designer - people are driven by a creative passion for their favorite business, in connection with this, their productivity, learning speed is very good.
And if I am a system administrator (network engineer, database administrator, etc.), then where should I look for the creative component? Well, I downloaded a CCNA tutorial, a bunch of questions, a network equipment simulator, and at least the equipment itself is home - all this is boring if you don’t work somewhere with a provider, you don’t have that freedom, you can’t build your own little world from classes and objects, layers and animations; hence, there is no motivation to teach stupidly; read → reproduce → understand and so on for several months, until you learn it. Do I just not like my profession, why am I so bored of it? But it really is!
How to be?

Answer 1

Something like this:
Not everyone will be able to understand how unimaginably fun it is to raise your little cloud, configure it, test it, and make a fail-safe configuration. Deploy a cool storage emulator on simple hardware. Scour eBay, buy, and then mail and unpack freshly purchased Cisco switches for dissection and experimentation. Do 802.11x authentication with digital certificates on your home Wi-Fi point, get another point somewhere to do roaming. Buy a laptop with the expectation that your favorite hypervisor will stand on it. Get Infiniband cards and a switch, although in production you don’t fucking need it. Look at Gartner's squares of leaders in various industries, test their solutions, which, although you hear about for the first time in your life, you do because they are leaders. Set up a three-tier application with automatic scaling. Spend hours finishing up your favorite workflow to deploy spherical AD in a vacuum. Install a new version of Exchange and migrate data from hundreds of users named John Smith. At night, troubleshoot an annoying problem at your home booth, participate in beta programs of your favorite software manufacturers. Subscribe to technical blogs on server administration and write one yourself, go to specialized conferences on your vacation. To make the perfect sizing of server hardware for some unimaginable fictitious task. For hours looking at photos of a new piece of iron and dreaming that someday you could touch it live and implement it with some customer. Read RFCs and standards documentation to understand how it actually works. Dream of getting access to the internal knowledge base of large vendors. Study in your free time and take vendor exams, not because your uncle at work said, but because you have already outlined a plan for your professional development for 5 years ahead. And many other very diverse and interesting things.

Answer 2

Do something that is not boring. If your work is boring to you - well, you have to admit the truth, it is boring to you. That's all.

Answer 3

System administration does not end with networks and DBMS, as an option to move to a related area, for example: combating DDoS, clustering, highload, clouds. Try to make a fault-tolerant CDN for highload, if you haven’t done this before - keep yourself busy for a month, the admin is not paid for certificates and other pieces of paper, no, they probably require them somewhere, but that’s the criterion. The same CCNA, either you work with networks every day and pass it without much preparation, or it’s hard to imagine a more boring reading. You can always find something interesting, the motivation is in your head, or you can go to another area and admit that this one is simply not for you.

Answer 4

Look for a new job with more complex tasks that require a non-standard approach (creative component?). Challenge and reach new heights.

Answer 5

As an option to go freelancing on the same code, there are a lot of interesting projects, there are not enough qualified personnel, self-education goes off scale
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