Spirit is more important than technical skills in Bug Bounty

By
Most people in bug bounty focus too much on technical side of it but ignore the spiritual side completely. We can clearly that in bug bounty community. The number of questions and blog posts relating to technical stuffs, tips, tricks is overwhelming compare to the spiritual resources. The most common spirit related articles are burn-out and keep-trying-encouragement, which are just enough to scrape the surface of it.

However, I believe that your spirit contributes to 70% of your success in bug bounty, your technical skill is just 30%. Maybe that is the reason why many beginners struggle to find their first bug and even give up bug bounty. They mostly focus on learning technical hacking skills, while ignoring the spiritual side completely, or don't even know such a thing exist.

This phenomena is not exclusive to bug bounty or hacking. I believe we can see it in all fields if we pay enough attention. Here are some examples:

The Vietnamese National Football team had no good results when competing in Asian Football tournaments for the last 20 years or more. Although many coaches kept saying that Vietnamese player's technical skill are on par with Korean, Japanese players. They kept losing to Korean and Japanese. So, there are factors other than technical skill contributes to performance of football players. I believe that Korean and Japanese players are more "professional". They are more discipline off-field, calmer in pressure and more experience. In other word, their spiritual skills are better.

It is the same in Esport, League of Legend. Many Vietnamese players have good skills, but when competing internationally, they don't do well. And although some players did well, they tend to perform badly the next season. Why is that?. I believe that they enjoy their success for too long, they become complacent or just lazy. This is a spiritual problem.

My number 1 athlete is Cristiano Ronaldo, because he has a super strong, grounded spirit. His physical body and technical skill are also crazy, but these are by the results of his spirit. We can tell because he is famous for his discipline, hard work, he rarely miss a penalty kicks and the more pressure they put on him, the better he performs. Lionel Messi has a pretty strong spirit too, otherwise, he won't be able to do well in top-level football at the age of 36. An example of not-as-strong spirit is Neymar. When he first got famous. He is known for his crazy technical skill and many people expected him to be the next best player, just as Ronaldo and Messi. But he never reaches this level. I believe it is because of his work ethic.

Finally, my point is, technical skill is overrated because it is easier to see and gauge. In the other hands, spiritual maturity is a much important factor, but it is ignored by many people because it is subtle and hard to notice. At this point, you may wonder what exactly is the spirit that I keep talking about. It is a set of mental qualities that have positive effects on our life and performance. For examples, 
- Discipline
- Dedication
- Integrity
- Long attention span
- Discomfort tolerance
- Faith
- Appreciation
- Sleep early (so that we have surplus energy)
- Confidence (if you have nothing to be confidence at, at least be confidence in your ability to stay focus and learn something new).
- Ability to go through procrastination
- Ability to make decision (if you decide to sleep early, you may have to sacrifice some of your gaming or Kdrama time at night)
- ...

Being aware of these qualities are good for the first step of improving your spiritual skills.

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 16, 2023 at 9:31 PM

    Very important message! Thanks, hope you will keep posting more on your blog

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 5, 2023 at 2:03 PM

    Nice Blog ! i want to add one thing that is a key of everything (i believe) and it's a MINDSET.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are very welcome. I read all comments!

Popular posts from this blog

Beginner Tutorial - How to learn the Technical Skill and Hacker Mindset That Are Required to Find Your First Bug Bounty.

By
In 2023, there are so many bug bounty resources for beginners, much more than before. I believe this is a bad thing for beginners, because now, they have to deal with so much unnecessary distractions just from choosing and sticking to a learning path alone. The over-abundance of free resources also fuels procrastination, we usually see people jumping from one learning path to another, without actually touch a real target. In this article, I will show you how much learning is enough. So you can get out of your learning rabbit holes and start hunting on a real target. By the way, this article aims to help you find bugs in IDOR, Information Disclosure, Business Logics, Broken Access Control. It may not help you to find injections bugs or misconfiguration bugs. Because I don't know how hunt them myself. # Technical Skill If you can solve Practitioner labs in PortSwigger with relatively ease, you have enough technical skill to hunt bugs: - https://portswigger.net/web-security/logic-flaw
Read more

The power of focus

By
A quote in the movie John Wick 1: John Wick is the main of focus, commitment and sheer will Out of all the good traits, the movie writer chooses only 3 traits to describe how bad ass John Wick is. That shows how powerful focus is. I believe he also gets his excellence skills thank to these 3 traits. Focus, commitment and sheer will are pretty similar to each others, they show that the man can stick to something for a long period of time, without switching goal, despite inconvenient challenges. If we apply this to bug bounty, it means, we make a goal, and stick to it, despite all self-doubts. For example, Losef is a beginner, who tries to find his first bug, he sets a goal to hunt on a program for 7 days. In day 1, he feels overwhelmed by how much details his target has. In day 2, he tests features one by one, but finds nothing, he feels down. In day 3, he feels that you have hit a steel wall, which he cannot even imagine how to get pass it. In day 4, he notices the program stats, which
Read more

How to succeed in bug bounty as a non-talented bug hunter

By
Image
When I started bug bounty hunting about 4 years ago. I looked up information about top bug bounty hunter and wondered how are they hunting bugs and grow their H1 reputation so fast. 1 year later, when I found my 1st, 10th, 20th bugs. I still had this question. Because although I had found some bugs, it took me a few days to find one. Recently, as I get more mature in bug bounty. I start to develop a deep understanding for a program. I see many attack surfaces that other people don't realize. When this program releases a new feature, I check if this feature can be abused to attack the attack surfaces A, B, C or D. Oftentimes, at least 1+ bugs are found. When I keep hunting on this program and discover a new attack surface, I check if any existing features can be abused to attack this attack surface. Oftentimes, at least 1+ bugs are found. When there is no new released feature and attack surfaces. I sometimes  wander the program, looking at already tested features and to my surprise.
Read more