I studied around 148-150 top hacker interviews/talks on YouTube in the last 2 months. It was around 177 hrs of content and It took me around 200 hrs or more to study all of them. My initial goal was to consume all top hacker interviews/talks that exists on the internet so that I could learn and understand what I was doing wrong and exactly what actions of mine were stalling my progress. In my opinion, the fastest way to gain experience is to learn from experiences of others and not do mistakes they have done. My goal with writing this is to distill all my learnings into a blog. As always, this is going to be personal, written for myself. If it helps, it helps! If not, would highly recommend studying all those videos on your own.
The second year in bug bounties was way too different in terms of efforts, motivation and results as compared to the first year. If I just go by numbers, it hasn’t even been 1 full year yet — but I was feeling stuck. I could not comprehend what I was doing wrong. The actions I was taking were not resulting in a lot of outcomes, and that resulted in me wanting to not put in more efforts. The number of hours I was putting in declined significantly, that resulted in me losing motivation, not finding bugs, not hunting on targets, not being consistent, etc.
In my opinion — If we don’t understand what we are dong wrong, how’ll we correct our paths and progress forward? If we keep doing the same thing, we’ll end up getting the same results. If we want to improve and get better, we must be willing to improve upon things that does not work. So, this was the place where I was stuck at. I had no idea what was going wrong with the way I’m working (except the amount of time I was putting in which happens when we are in a negative self-talk spiral aka burnout).
I tried reaching out to a few trusted hacker friends who are doing great in the field & who I admire a lot:
While their answers were very thoughtful and helpful, the real problem was with me. The real problem was — I was seeing symptoms of the problem, but I was not aware of what exactly the problem was. And if you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t ask the right questions to allow people to help you in the right way, unless they have been through the situation you are going through.
Additionally, I don’t know why but I struggle reaching out to people for help — even if I want to. I struggle reaching out to people for collab — even if I want to. And honestly I think, what if they have answered “whatever question you are going to ask them” before? what if I won’t add as much value to their time and end up wasting their time for no reason? I should read whatever content they have put in on the internet before reaching them out.
The only option I had left was to learn what exactly the top hackers are doing right, so that I could understand what exactly I was doing wrong. And the only way to do that is to either reach them out, ask them questions or to consume every single advice they have put in on the internet. It’s hard to know what to ask when you are not entirely sure of the problem. So, I decided to consume all the top hacker interviews/talks that exists on the internet. It took me almost 200 hrs to study these 170+ hrs of content.