How to Study Effectively | Cybersecurity and Hacking

Key Takeaways

at least a few times a year I suffer a massive hits in loss of motivation a few times per year a few times a day more like so today we're going to look at how to study effectively and maybe more importantly some techniques we can use to stay motivated just keep in mind that everyone is a little different and whilst I'll share what I've researched and what worked for me you might need to make some adjustments or follow a different approach entirely but I hope at least this gives you a good starting point there are also some books and resources I'll share later on and you can take a look at how I structure and plan my weeks with this thing as always if you enjoy the video don't forget to like And subscribe and let's dive on in before we look at how to structure study and get the most out of our sessions we should try and figure out what's driving us and if we're going to talk about motivation there's something that I need that motivates us all now we have our coffee and our liquid motivation let's also talk about what motivates us is it career advancement and promotion is it personal growth and satisfaction maybe meeting requirements of our industry standard or validating your skill sets you could also be future proofing your career and ensuring that you don't fall behind when I first thought about this I thought it doesn't really matter why as long as there's a reason but then after some thoughts and some further reading I realized that all of my motivation comes from growth and satisfaction of completing a challenge it's funny because I really couldn't care less about industry standards and career development I do things I find interesting which is how I ended up here in the first place because cyber security looks like a fun job and this is probably why I didn't complete my a levels and took a different path before going to University now that's not to say that your career development and promotion and other things aren't valid motivators it's just not motivates me personally so we're all different and that's awesome so figure out where your motivation comes from and you need to try and make sure that you keep swimming in the right direction at least for a decent amount of time anyway switching lanes all the time and chasing too many things at once will become overwhelming and you have the ability to think critically and say to yourself this is what I set out to do and this is my motivation for doing it and often you'll be surprised that more often than not just thinking objectively about what you want will put you back on track some other things that helps me when I found my motivation suffering are setting smaller but more achievable goals ones that can get done in about half of the allotted time but usually I use that momentum to keep going I also give myself a break and put a time limit on that break for example at lunch I'll take a 20 minute walk or I'll read a book or play a game or just change my environments a little bit what's important for me is coming out of my office and just spending 10 20 minutes either sitting in the garden or making a cup of tea and reading a book here in this room which is like a living room I suppose once again different things work for different people so it's worth taking the time to experiment all right that's my break over anyway so back to the office funny thing about studying is that when it comes to studying for technical roles like penetration testing it's vastly different to studying when you're a student we're in the business of problem solving and quite frankly speaking when it comes to real world skills more often than not schools did little to nothing to prepare us so how can we become more effective at building these technical skills well first we should prioritize doing things ourselves even if you get stuck and need to use a walkthrough or a tutorial just take what you need to get moving forward and then continue working through the next problem one thing that's really helped me improve my pen testing skills is setting up Labs myself this includes deploying and configuring ad and hundreds of web services over the years and also within reason not just copying and pasting commands in the pH updates I listed a bunch of commands to set up a MySQL DB for testing Try and write them out it'll take two minutes and it's going to help you begin to understand what things do how they work and maybe most importantly you'll begin to recognize and understand error messages when you're troubleshooting your payloads next we want to build on things that we know and there are some different perspectives on this one is that you should just try and push your boundaries a little bit by a little bit so that you don't become overwhelmed or completely lost and the second is kind of like Mastery learning where you take everything one step at a time and you don't move forward until you've mastered the previous topic finally something that really helped me was blocking time for my study sessions previously when I was working nine to five I would study from 7am till 9 but these days my schedule is a little bit more flexible so I tend to have a block of study in the afternoon after I've gotten my main tasks done for the day find a consistent time slot that works for you and start with an hour and if you can do that consistently for a month or so then maybe push out to two hours but don't expect to be able to go from nothing to vast amounts of study overnight after a day or two you'll burn out and then it's two months and you're back to square one or even worse way behind where you started so this is what I did last week I write down the key tasks I need to get done and then I fill the rest of my time up with things as they come up or I put my that time into the long-term project that I have going on in this case we're working on a new course and we're also looking to release the certification I used to keep an Excel sheet for this but honestly I used it for a while and then forgot about it and at least while this is on my desk it's in View and it's been good so far for the last few months or so another tool I use is a Pomodoro Timer and for General tasks I work in blocks of 25 minutes though often I'm doing something that requires deep focus like building a lab or if I'm doing some code review and testing an open source project in this case I make a tea or a coffee set a two hour timer kick the cats out of my office if they're not already asleep and then turn my phone over as it's always already on silent anyway and crack on I actually really enjoy these sessions and definitely my best work always gets done and finally I limited myself to two items of study these days before I was like I need to improve my programming I want to do more Port swinger mystery Labs I need to you're doing hack the Box machines each week and then I want to go for oswe and crto looks interesting and I need to pass my pmpt and whilst this sounds like a recipe for productivity and getting everything done it's actually a recipe for the exact opposite getting literally nothing done and also has the potential to lead to burnout which is our next topic okay so my opinion on avoiding burnout basically boils down to understanding how much time and energy you have and prioritizing things accordingly you can't do everything so if everything is a priority you're probably going to burn out it's as simple as that really and I know that there are other factors that play here depending on different factors of stress from work or life but if you have more stress that means you can do less and so either you have to reduce that stress or you have to reduce the number of things you're trying to do and that means less priorities that was very wordy and probably not at all practical but a good way to do it is to set yourself something achievable set an attainable and easy schedule something that looks really easy on paper not something that is using every minute of every day and once you've managed to do that for a month add to it you'll be much happier and more successful in the long run consistency over quantity 100 another important thing is to keep work and study and Life In Balance if you can if you have things outside the world of cyber security then make sure to take care of them including your health and honestly if you're like me working from home try and leave the house at least once per day one of the things I struggled with previously was disconnecting I'm usually available 24 hours a day seven days a week including weekends but now I'm spending a little bit more time of my weekends going off bouldering or going surfing and I'm completely away from my PC even if there is a disaster there's nothing I can do about it and that kind of Disconnect is really good for you I think we're somehow obsessed with replying to messages and emails instantly and unless you're a medical professional on call you do not need a 15 second SLA so that's it for this video I hope you found it insightful and can put some of the techniques we've talked about into practice if there's something that you do that you want to share with others that helps you study more effectively then let us know in the comments down below and as always if you enjoyed the video don't forget to like And subscribe and we'll catch you next time