@Jakeishtar said:
… spent hours on a “easy” box getting no where, just to read in the walk throughs how easy it was. Has anyone one at any point just feel like they do not have what it takes?
I most definitely felt that before. I just spend probably 6 or 7 days (and I do mean 9-hour days) on Node… that’s a machine you can solve in probably 5 minutes if you know how.
The contradiction of this line of work is that it’s literally about finding a needle in a haystack. So you’re basically looking for almost nothing all the time.
And whenever somebody points at the needle, your mind will always go “off course!”.
I admire your honor, not many people have that today: some here will care more about their title and rooting a box, than about how they earned it.
If people would take your standards I bet my money there would be far less ‘hackers’ around here.
So I respect the fact that you are trying to earn your ranks in such pure way.
That being said: there is also wisdom is your frustration. As far as my human knowledge goes: things can frustrate us, only because we somehow know there is a better way (for us). So there might be a better way for you to learn.
All we do here (and in any field you’ll ever learn for that matter) is gather memories, ‘things we know’ and what can separate you from others is how fast or creatively you tie all that information together.
The point is: you are expecting yourself to tie stuff together, but you don’t have a lot of stuff to tie together… and then you spend hours with that limited stuff, trying to find new things.
That’s like trying to find your way around the world, with only a map of LA.
That makes me think that you have great potential for this line of work, in that your ability to look at what you know over and over, looking at it from different angles is extensive. It’s probably not until you twisted and turned to see every angle that you’ll consider calling for help.
That’s great, but you also need to face the fact that you’ll always be blind to stuff you have no memories about.
After a while you may start to see patterns, and so you start to develop ‘a feeling’ that something you don’t really know may be a valid path to investigate, it may appear that you see stuff others don’t, but the fact of the matter is that you just acquired enough memories, and are intelligent enough to see common patterns. You then start to develop this borderline vision of where things not quite exactly match anything you seen before, but are similar enough to a known general principle, to figure it out.
You seem to have the intelligence, patience and honor… Those are actually the hard parts to acquire. Now you need to find a way that’s suited for you to gather knowledge.
What you call frustration, I see more as an internal knowing that you need to acquire more building-blocks before your intelligence can start to build houses nobody ever seen before.
You just somehow need to find or way suited for you, and invest less in the idea ‘that you should already know’. That’s just BS: you just have no way of knowing something if you didn’t see it before.
Best of luck.