Sr. Systems Administrator...thats my title as least. I'm the team lead/engineer for a team of about 10 people. I manage a web farm hosting around 30 applications, the load balancers, web application firewalls, and servers in the farm. Also the SME on VMware for the corporate side of the house. My team as a whole manages around 400-500 servers.
Starting out, I got a job as desktop guy for a local company, in which the network admin left after a few months. Everything was handed to me and I worked night and day studying, reading, researching until I learned enough to manage things. Then, I started expanding my knowledge with IT certifications with reading and studying at night. As of today, I have quite a few certs including: VCP3, VCP4, CCNA, MCSA, MCTS, MCDST, RCAS-AD, CSSA, A+, Net+, Sec+
As cheesy as it sounds, because of my career success and how I got where I am, I'm a firm believer in setting a goals, working your butt off, and putting the time in towards being successful.