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My journey throughout the months of being an imposter
For the LONGEST time, I didn’t think I had it in me to be in the blockchain security industry. After all, I am the greatest imposter in this world.
The people in this industry were either already spending a lot of time on Computer Science, or they already have some web2 security knowledge, or they have been tinkering with technical-related stuff, or their parents were computer scientists or computer engineers and they had been mentored well since a young age.
I came in with absolutely zero knowledge (haha) of programming and solidity. I am the absolute opposite of technical. I never understood the computer, I don’t know what is a raspberry pi (I thought they were some delicious pies). I don’t know what is HTTPs or API or JSON or whatever jargon that people just talk about these days.
I am a humanities person. Talk to me about history, literature, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and I can have a good conversation with you. Talk to me about computers and you’ll just be talking to me.
I never thought I could amount to anything. I was scared to use technologies like Github, or the command terminal because all these were alien to me. Everything was so overwhelming.
During the first 6 months, I was scared to learn, so I did a lot of nothing. What does this mean? It means that I didn’t try to step out of my comfort zone and learn difficult things. I just pattern-matched every single codebase that I saw without understanding the reasoning. “Use safetransfer instead of transfer”. My favourite was saying “Using abi.encodePacked will result in a collision!” without even understanding what it meant. I didn’t try to understand the whole codebase, because I already told myself I couldn’t possibly understand anything. Most days were just me beating myself up for being “too lousy and bad”.
I failed before I even started anything.
It wasn’t until after many months (8-9) that I tried out Foundry, the testing framework. I felt so weird doing something I’ve never done before, running commands on the computer. Every time I want to learn something there’s always a voice at the back of my head telling me that I shouldn’t try and I’m making a fool of myself.
I realized that what was holding me back was not because of my incapability to learn, but because of my mindset. Since May, I’ve been focusing on changing myself. I’m still in the process. It’ll take time. I’ve contemplated giving up so many times, but it’ll take time.
Yesterday I came across a quote:
“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
I was beating myself up because I did not see any harvest. It’s deplorable, really. After 1 year, no meaningful harvest, nothing to be proud of? Everybody is already moving far ahead after 3 months, and 6 months, and I’m still stuck in a rut.
Over the past months, I’ve learned a lot to deal with negativity. One of them is how to deal with comparison.
I’ve learned that anybody can learn anything. It just takes time, especially if I do not have prior experience in the topic or even relevant experience.
A person who plays tennis and badminton can learn how to play squash relatively easily and quickly. All these sports are racquet sports, so the skills of the racquet are somewhat transferrable.
A person who swims and runs and plays basketball can learn how to play squash pretty easily as well. Since the person is sporty already, he has the endurance and the strength to carry a racquet. Racquet skills may take some time to learn, but it’s manageable.
A person who plays the piano and guitar can also learn how to play squash. Their transferrable skills? Focus, hand-eye coordination. Racquet skills may take some time, leg movements may take some time, but it’s manageable.
Can a person who plays computer games learn how to play squash? Of course. What transferrable skills do they have? Again, the ability to focus, and have a good reaction speed is needed to learn squash.
Anybody can learn anything. It’s just about how fast they learn. It’s about how many transferrable skills they have.
When I started web3 auditing, I was really angry at myself because I did not have any obvious transferrable skills. In fact, I did not have any skills.
But is that true? Do I really not have any transferrable skills? Let’s see.
I play computer games. Critical thinking, focus. Those are transferrable. I learned humanities. Again, critical thinking, communication, writing. Those are transferrable. I play music. Attention to detail, and focus. Those are transferrable. These skills may not be obvious, but at least I have something to start with.
Some people take 3 months to succeed. Others take 6 months. Some take years. Some don’t even achieve any form of success. Why are some people so fast? They have many closely transferrable skills.
I have to accept that it is unfortunately the case that I did not learn anything about programming and security in the many years of my existence. Thus, it’ll take longer for me to succeed.
In fact, it may be a good thing that I learned things unrelated to programming and security. There was a Ted Talk talking about generalization vs specialization, and it really hit me. I always looked up to those people who specialized in web3 auditing. But that is not to say that generalized people cannot do well.
Here is the video for reference:
What am I going to do now?
I am going to try and learn things out of my league. In fact, I am already doing so. I am learning about ABI encoding. Looks extremely difficult. Just click on this link and scroll through:
https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/latest/abi-spec.html
I’ve managed to understand quite a bit of the topic. I’ll be creating videos to share my learnings.
I am going to focus on the ‘seeds’ that I plant. Every day, I am going to learn something new and difficult. I will try my best not to look at the harvest, and just concentrate on my learnings. I will document a short reflection of what I have learned every day.
I am going to keep trying. I am going to be patient with myself.
I can’t compare to others who have experience. Even those who are younger than me already have years of experience in the security field.
Comparison is always second nature. Every time I open Twitter, it just makes me feel bad because everybody is talking about their achievements (that’s why I try not to log in for extended periods of time)
I don’t see much talk about mindset shifting and how to change our negative selves. I believe a lot of people are struggling with negativity behind the veil of posted success.
I will be sharing more on how I attempt to change my mindset.
Do I think I have it in me now? Not really, but my focus is not on whether I have it or not. It’s not something so binary. As long as I keep learning, day by day, I believe that I’ll be one the best in the future.
I’ll check back in a year.