What Motivates Me Is Not What Drives Me
I suppose this is a follow-up to a point I made in my post, “Natural Talent is Baloney,” in regards to a question asked of me that I had never thought to have asked myself: why do I take on such a large workload when it very clearly causes me so much stress?
It’s a difficult question to answer, and I guess I don’t really have a single concrete statement to give as one. Most see my workload as overwhelming and cumbersome: I’m the administrator of IrisSec; an executive board member of Solar Energy Association where I’m currently leading 3 projects; an organizer at HackMerced; an associate of the Association for Computing Machinery and in close communications with the cybersecurity SIG; an undergraduate university student taking 3 upper-division classes this semester, one of which is widely regarded as the most rigorous CSE course at this university; an employee at UC Merced Extension; an employee at UC Merced IT Networks; studying for my Network+ and Security+ professional certifications; grinding for my Synack Red Team technical assessment which I’ll take in November; and all while working on a variety of side projects.
Okay – typing that out, I do see how it may seem cumbersome on paper. However, I don’t personally feel it encumbering on my shoulders. They don’t seem like things that are impeding on my everyday life. No, they constitute my everyday life. I hope I don’t sound like someone with zero work-life balance unknowingly experiencing burnout and in denial of it, but the weights I put on my shoulders are not things that stop me from living my own life, they are my own life.
I chose this. I chose all of this. I chose to work two jobs because having only one bored me. I chose to be involved in a great quantity of organizations because they represent me and allow me to express three keystones of my identity: a hacker, an engineer, and an environmentalist. I chose to take the most difficult elective upper-division class in my major at my university because you know what? – I want to be challenged. I’m so sick and tired of cruising through life, not having to struggle. High school was so easy for me because I never felt truly challenged nor pushed to my limit. I chose to pursue my professional certifications because school and work and clubs alone aren’t enough of a workload for me; I need more and I truly want to be pushed to and beyond my limits. I chose to take the Synack Red Team technical assessment in November because stuff like that isn’t work to me! I’m a hacker, so of course I love breaking stuff while getting hits of feel-good chemicals in my brain for it!
Someone once told me to not get so busy that I forget to live, but to me, this is living. Truly, I’m not someone in love with work and I’m not a workaholic, and I hope that doesn’t come across as desperate denial but rather a desperate need to clear up a fundamental misunderstanding in why one would perceive it as such.
Some people play video games. Some people party. Some people play sports. Me? I choose to learn. I choose to spend my free time studying vulnerabilities and systems and writing exploits and understanding how everything fits together. I choose to spend my free time reading books and papers and reading writeups for awesome new and novel exploits and then revel at how clever they are and admire the beauty of how they break systems so precisely like a surgeon’s scalpel to accomplish the otherwise impossible. I say these not to place them as an “other side” party to the likes of video gaming, partying, and sports, but simply to say that it is what I do similar to how one would choose an alternative, admittedly more conventional, option.
What motivates me is not what drives me. What drives me is my love for learning, the prime reason why computer hacking is the obvious path in life for me since it’s a never-ending journey of learning. I truly do admire how hacking is an art: the art of exploitation, the ability to see a set of rules like writing on a long scroll of paper and then just reach through them effortlessly as if taking advantage of an ethereal space to make the impossible happen, and then making the impossible happen. You see a harmless input function, but I see my route to a full takeover of the system. You see a computer network, but I see my arena to sniff, spoof, and finagle my way to achieve whatever ends I wish. You see a computerized device, but I see a puzzle waiting to be solved. What can I say? As a kid, I accidentally broke a lot of things. As an adult, I purposely break a lot of things.
What motivates me, on the other hand, is my fear of boredom. Motive and drive are like voltage and current, respectively; voltage is the cause, the driving force, and current is the effect. An individual stuck in a room with nothing but a buzzer that shocks them upon pressing will, to relieve their own boredom, voluntarily subject themselves to that painful shock. I have no doubt that, as patient as I may perceive myself to be, I would, in that same situation, subject myself to a moment of quick pain just to be relieved of my boredom. Thankfully, I am not some subject to a scientific experiment put in an arbitrary and otherwise unlikely environment like that. Instead, I can choose to indulge in other things.
This has been a messy blog post, a singular stream of consciousness with zero editing and zero planning and zero structure. I frankly found most of these points as I kept going. This was cathartic and I didn’t realize I needed it until now, at the end.
Happy trails.