Write down the goal you want to achieve with this course as precisely as possible. Try to break it down and describe it in 500 words at most.
After starting Hack the Box I find they make me want to WRITE THINGS. Jesus Christ, how horrifying. This is the prompt for Chapter 5 of Way of Learning titled: Learning Process. I kind of ignored the other writing assignments because I hated doing homework as a teenager why the hell would I do it in my 30s, before I remembered the importance and impact of writing down what you learn… So here’s my short essay on what I want to get out of this course.
I’ve always had a very natural mindset in the way of attacking. Whenever someone tells me something’s not possible I don’t reply with, “okay”, or even the more common “why not”? I tend to hit people with a, “watch me try anyway.” I don’t like being told what to do, I don’t like being told what I can and can’t do. There’s typically no WHY. No underlying mechanism that prevents me from doing the thing I want to do. You tell me I can’t eat 50 marshmallows in a single sitting, goddamn it I’m going to TRY ANYWAYS! Unfortunately, bashing your skull against a problem isn’t always a practical way to solve it. Take an example I have much more experience in than Cybersecurity, DotA2. In DotA2, there are an INSANE amount of systems working both for you and against you, which can create paralyzing game states where there are potentially hundreds of options open to you, and only a small handful of them meaningfully progress the game state both now and later. An even smaller handful of them progress the game state in a way that’s favorable for you, sometimes in ways that won’t pay off immediately. If you are playing Earthshaker into Phantom Lancer, and your lane was… absolute hell in a handbasket. You have your ultimate, Echo Slam, basically a guaranteed one shot against this duplicating fisherman cat. However, Phantom Lancer knows this and is going to position himself in a way to bait you into using it in a circumstance that favors him greatly. If your lane has been going poorly, you lack the economic power (items) or physical power (levels) to compete with him, since he was more than likely your lane opponent in most games. So what can you do to improve your chances of success? Farm for more economic power, specifically the item Blink Dagger so you can engage on him from a distance, and locations he can’t see you in. Turns out, teleporting on top of someone is an incredible way to catch them off guard.
So I hope from this course to expand my ability to learn. To stop running into walls when I don’t know the answer, throwing my hands up and marching away. Any problem you encounter is simply just a lack of information on your part. Do you know enough about how this particular system, or set of systems, work? If not, what do you know about them? These are mindsets that are incredibly powerful when applied, but in a high-stress environment it’s hard to pull them intuitively unless you train yourself on them. So my goals are to train myself to be able to look at the ass of the elephant and instead of asking, “is this an elephant” to be able to figure out what about the elephant’s ass I need to know, to interact with, to engage with in order to solve whatever goal I am there to accomplish. I don’t need to know it’s the ass of an elephant in most situations, I just need to be able to identify enough about it based on my own knowledge to know what options I have. The only way you acquire that knowledge is via good learning habits, and that’s what I hope this course can teach me with. Eventually leading to my final goal, a career in Cybersecurity as a Red Team Penetration Tester/Physical Pen Tester. (I STILL CANNOT BELIEVE PEOPLE PAY FOR THAT)