Hello Amazing person, if you are like me, you probably know the feeling of failure. You probably know what it feels like to be denied your goals and to hate the feeling that follows.

• To not hack that machine you’ve been trying to hack all week
• To not find any vulnerabilities after hunting for a week
• To not pass that OSCP exam on your first try which you can’t stand

These feelings are normal and i want to talk to you about how you can handle them.

First of all, it’s important that you understand it’s okay to feel sad and down and that’s okay to fail. This might seem very obvious, but please don’t underestimate this. Think back to the last exam you failed and how you felt, i bet you it was anything but okay.

That being said, i am sure you drew a lesson from that instance and i am sure it made you into a better person and i hope you can see that every failure which leads to a failure is not a failure after all ... it’s merely a lesson.

That, my dear viewer/reader, is the essence of learning. We have to make mistakes in order to understand what we should and should not do because, let’s be honest, it’s not easy to explain every little detail to another person. What we know is known to us but we often can’t explain all the things we feel and touch and experience. Language often falls short for us and that’s why it’s so important that we all make our own mistakes in a safe environment.

I hope this helps you see that failure is not something we should try to shy away from or actively avoid but that we can make an equally big mistake by not learning anything from mistakes and failures and an even bigger mistake by not allowing ourselves to feel bad about it if that’s what our brain needs.

There’s a lot to unpack in that previous sentence so let’s start at the beginning. For me it does not matter how often i fall. I realized quickly that falling is a part of life but getting up is an even bigger one. We have to face our mistakes and we have a moral obligation to do what’s right. This means that we will feel bad at times and we will feel disgusted by ourselves even because we haven’t hacked in over a week or we haven’t found any bugs in months. That’s okay, life is a rollercoaster and i believe we should sit back and enjoy the ride. This also means that when our motivation is peaking and we feel on top of the world, that i take full advantage of those good times by preparing for times i feel a bit down.

Feeling bad is okay, please allow yourself some breathing room. You are performing at the world top. Hacking requires knowledge from so many different fields, it’s a wonder that there are even people like you out there and even if you are not a hacker, the fact that are looking for self improvement is amazing in and of itself and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I want to devote a part of this piece to your worst enemy in life as well. This may seem a bit cliche but i am a far believer of the fact that we are our own worst enemies in every sense of the word. We can hold ourselves back with merely a thought. If we feel like we are on top of the world, there is almost nothing that can stop us, but one piece of bad news can ruin our streak for a long time. Don’t fight this, go with the flow amazing hacker. It’s like fighting the flow of time. There is nothing in the laws of psychics that stop time from flowing backwards, yet we can never make it do so. Funny don’t you think?

I want to leave you all a final message. In life, we all walk our own road, but that doesn’t mean we have to get up alone. You have friends in your life and if you do not, i will offer you a place you can call home. This place is full of hackers but i promise you we are good and you have nothing to fear from us. Define your own normal. Uncle Rat Out.