For the past few years, while I worked as a software engineer, I’ve fallen into frustration and haven’t been as productive as I wished for as I wished for. While I was learning programming in my initial days , it was different, I was pumped and fueled most of the time. Initially, I thought it was the experience and burnout I felt. But how do we overcome burnout? As I reflect upon my past, I came to realize that the main thing making my journey more enjoyable was the continuous drive to learn. When I was going through the basics of programming, I was always looking forward to learning new things and developing new features. The programming world felt different to me, and everything seemed new and interesting. The thrill of learning new things made me want to build more, which made me a better developer.
But now, two years later, here I am writing this to tell you—I’ve reached a point where I’m only now truly understanding what burnout is. Burnout seems to be real, and it won’t go away no matter what you do. No matter how long of a vacation you take, how many breaks you have, it’s not going to change. At the end of the day, you’ll return to the same routine. I once heard a quote from the famous Physique Olympia winner Chris Bumstead: “You are not what you think you are, you are what you do every day.” You can’t think of being someone unless you are doing it every single day.
Burnout can’t be treated by any external factor, it needs to be treated by fixing the cause that actually caused it. As I reflected on my past, I realized that the motivation that kept me going was learning new things. Understanding new ideas felt like rewiring my brain. Everything I learned in the initial phase was exciting. But after all these years, because I focused more on working rather than learning, my intrinsic motivation has faded.
So, starting today, I’m continuing my journey of learning something I love and fear—cybersecurity. I was once influenced by bug bounty hunting and worked on it day and night, even earning some money. But I never actually learned all the fundamentals properly. So, starting today, I’ll be posting a series of reflections on each chapter every day until I complete the entire PentesterLab course. I know this might sound a bit difficult, but the only way to face burnout is to step into it and actually do something correctly.
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