Impostor!!

I’ve been racking my brain for a while now to figure out what exactly I want to post or say on here. My intention was to start up with my home-lab but I kind of fell into a rut. About a week went by and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, and then it hit me….impostor syndrome!!!

I did not think this was a real thing but let me tell you it is. I got to the point where if I went into an interview and they asked me to point out a computer I would have messed that up. I really sit down and wonder how many people have gone through this and what you can do to straighten yourself out to get past it. I’m going to try and go through a process that has helped me some but geeesh this is a tough one.

A little background on me, I’m a very hands on learner. I break things to fix it and almost every piece of software I have encountered I have been able to learn the basics and then research the particulars. Now for learning in class and on paper I’m good at, I can write a paper and reports just fine, but when it comes to on the spot questions my introvert behind can fold. This doesn’t mean I can’t hold a conversation, its just I need to be comfortable to get started.

Fast Forward to my impostor syndrome. As I have been studying for the Security+, I started to feel that all the information I was going over either felt foreign to me while others just wouldn’t stick. This made me feel like the world's biggest fraud, I was asking myself how can I make it in a field and can’t get the entry level cert down. Now I go back to my home-lab out of frustration with studying and I’m able to setup and install Splunk/SecurityOnion and Snort and have a whole working lab where I can attack a Metasploit VM with Kali and then learn how to read logs and see how the machine was attacked. SO WHY AM I HAVING TROUBLE WITH THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BLUE SNARFING AND BLUE JACKING!!!!

The first issue is I was too busy trying to memorize (which is wrong) the key is to know and understand the material. Just as I break and fix software, I figure I have to apply the same tactics and methodology to studying. I am finding out reading a book or listening to Professor Messer is great, but for me I have to focus on practice tests and when I get something wrong read explanations of why. The wrong answer is me breaking it and the explanation is me fixing it. This has started to help me a lot in seeing the picture of security rather than just knowing the definition.