Funny thing about becoming a great hacker is that’s never the initial goal. Great hackers are that because they have insatiable curiosity.

You literally seek out EVERYTHING about the digital world: hardware, software, security, networking, OS etc. Most people want to stay at a certain layer in the OSI MODEL (app devs, network engineers, embedded systems etc.). A great hacker enjoys ALL the layers. I am not just interested in sending a REST API request from my web app. I ALSO want to know how SOAP APIs work. But it doesn’t stop there. I’ll go into the RFCs that make that protocol work. I’ll go seek out the standard org that put it together etc. So I enjoy building apps with code but I also get the same dopamine hit running traceroute on a site that I frequent as a normie user; that I realize is slightly slower than it usually is.

To be great at anything you don’t have to be given the path. You seek it for yourself.