How to think like a hacker

And how it will take your life and your career to the next level

Contrary to popular belief, hackers are not always the people who breach website security and steal personal data. The word also refers to the software developers who build revolutionary software by putting together some components in such a way that nobody thought of before.

This is why when you hear somebody referring to Mark Zuckerberg as a hacker, this doesn’t necessarily mean he is out there to steal your data, as many assume. What it means in the context is that he has built the most successful social media network in the world from his university dorms.

What is more interesting, however, is that the hackers think in a particular way and this way of thinking is not only applicable to technology. It can be applied anywhere. Regardless of who you are and what you do, if you learn to think like a hacker, the quality of your life will improve significantly.

This mode of thinking is not exclusively present in those traditionally referred to as hackers. Some of the best scientists, artists, and other creative individuals have it too. And, at its base, it is quite simple. It is all about thinking out of the box and not accepting the status quo.

But it’s more than just out-of-the-box thinking. Today, we will look at the core skill that makes both hackers and tech professionals successful.

How security vulnerabilities are exploited

The most common way of exploiting security holes in software is to use various accessible components of the said software for something other than what these components were intended for. For example, a very common way of exploiting web applications is to type text into various text boxes in such a way that it becomes an executable code. This is how, for example, cross-site scripting and SQL Injection work.

Hackers, both cyber criminals and the ones of the white-hat variety keep software developers on their toes. Now, you don’t only have to add all the input controls to your UI as prescribed by requirements, but you also need to think of all the ways your forms may be misused.

Of course, nobody ever intends to build a form that can directly accept the query language that will run in your database. However, if you fail to consider the possibility of someone trying to do it before you build the software, this is exactly what some hackers will do one day. The consequences of such malicious action may be catastrophic.

This is why, to be a good programmer, you need to think like a hacker. Yes, you can learn how to use various advanced technologies effectively. This will allow you to build software that satisfies all of the requirements given to you by project managers and business analysts. And those people who are usually much less tech-savvy than programmers will enthusiastically sign such software off. However, unless you can think of any non-standard ways your software can be used, it will only be a matter of time until somebody will use it as a tool of cybercrime.

There are also more benign ways of bypassing various checks on websites and making life more convenient for oneself at the expense of the website’s owner’s revenue. For example, there are online publications that allow you to read some articles for free before you have to apply for a paid subscription. On some of those websites, doing as little as clearing your browser’s cookies often gives you unlimited access to all of the content.

This action is not criminal. However, the developers of the websites who overlooked this are now responsible for the loss of some revenue by the publishing company.

This is how revolutionary technologies are built

Although the word “hacker” is often used to describe cybercriminals, this is not what this word originally meant. For a long time, the word for a cybercriminal was “cracker”. Hacker, on the other hand, was somebody who took some existing technology, did something unusual with it, and got some amazing results. This is how most revolutionary technologies are built, so it is safe to say that hackers are largely responsible for technological progress.

Bill Gates bought a widely unknown operating system, QDOS, from a small software house and, after making some changes to it, he released it as MS-DOS, which quickly became one of the most widely used operating systems at the time.

In the world of software development, one of the most used technologies of today was born from the process of hacking in the original sense of the world. Traditionally, JavaScript was only used in browsers. However, as a huge ecosystem of reusable JavaScript components was developed over the years, somebody came up with the idea of enabling JavaScript to be used elsewhere. This is how Node.js was born.

While initially dismissed as a stupid way of using JavaScript, Node.js has become one of the most widely used technologies in web development. Its main library of reusable components, NPM, is now the biggest repository of its kind. Node.js has now entered niches beyond web development and you can even write desktop applications in it.

What made Node.js so popular is a significantly simplified way of becoming a full-stack web developer. If, in the past, you had a steep learning curve in front of you, having to learn entirely different languages for each layer of the application stack, with Node.js, you don’t. In the MEAN stack, which stands for MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, and Node.js, it’s JavaScript all the way through.

Hack your career like a pro

The key point that defines a hacker is not that he is good with technology, but that he thinks outside of the box and ignores the status quo. This is why there is a term “life hack”, which relies on a similar mode of thinking that traditional hackers use, but applies it to a wider context of life.

For example, the conventional way of becoming a software developer is to do a degree in Computer Science. However, if you start asking questions about why it has to be this way, you will find a much easier, unconventional route.

Why exactly do you need a computer science degree? Because it demonstrates that you know a thing or two about computers. If that’s all it is, how can you demonstrate your skills in a different way that is easier and cheaper? Well, there is nothing that stops you from learning how to program in your own spare time and building a website, a portfolio of repositories on GitHub, or some mobile apps.

Congratulations! You have now made yourself desirable to potential employers in the software industry and have completely bypassed the degree stage.

A similar principle applies to salary negotiations. Everybody wants to get paid as much as possible and the accepted convention is that you work in one job, do your job well, and wait for your superiors to notice your efforts and get you promoted. Or you can look at the whole employment thing from a free market perspective and treat the process of choosing your job no different from the process of buying a loaf of bread in a supermarket.

If this is how you see the job market, there is nothing that stops you from simply changing your employer for the one that pays you better and treats you better in other ways if your current one doesn’t fully satisfy you.

According to the status quo, you rely on your employer for your professional training. Therefore, your professional growth is usually limited by what your employer thinks your training requirements are. However, if you take a step back and think about it, you will see that there is nothing that stops you from building some advanced professional skills in your own spare time.

If your professional development in a given employment is restricted, this is probably done so your superiors don’t have to promote you. However, if you take the process of acquiring hard-to-get in-demand skills into your own hands, you can make yourself promotable. Now, you can either try to negotiate at your current place of work or just go somewhere else. You have the leverage.

You can go deep with certain life hacks

All of the examples from the previous section are good life hacks that apply to your career. However, some others will improve your wider life. The most effective of such lifehacks are the ones that help you to change your wider mindset and your whole attitude towards life.

One such technique is a principle known as “The Law of Attraction”. Some of you may have heard of it and completely disregard it as a “woo-woo” or “New Age”. And yes, you may be right that things in the real world don’t quite work the way the followers of this method believe them to be.

However, whether things really work this way or not is completely beside the point. While it’s important to have accurate beliefs, sometimes those become hindrances rather than help. Sometimes, it’s not the ones whose model of the world most accurately matches the objective reality that become the winners in life. It’s the ones whose model of reality is the most useful to them and their goals, even if it’s not 100% accurate.

For example, there are plenty of millionaires who don’t know much about how the economy works and have very wild misconceptions about it. At the same time, those who know very well how monetary systems work, like the professors of economics, very rarely become millionaires. We will come back to this topic shortly.

For those who haven’t heard of the Law of Attraction, let me explain what it is. The proponents of this principle believe that your external reality is a reflection of your dominant mode of thinking. Essentially, any thought about what reality is like sends a signal to the universe and the universe responds by making your personal reality match this thought.

Whether this is true or not is debatable. The modern scientific method is limited in scope and can neither prove nor disprove it. However, there is one aspect of it that definitely works in a way that is confirmed by science. This phenomenon is known as cognitive bias.

Why you should embrace rather than eliminate your cognitive biases

More often than not, you will hear people telling you that you need to be aware of your cognitive biases and try your best to eliminate them. However, anyone who will take a step back and carefully think about it will soon realize that, instead of eliminating cognitive biases, you can get them to serve you. After all, if cognitive biases wouldn’t have been useful in one way or another, they wouldn’t have had evolved.

Why would you want to eliminate a particular cognitive bias? Because it prevents you from having an objective view of the world. However, the follow-up questions that come from this are why should you want to have a completely objective view of the world, and whether it is even possible to achieve it?

It is indeed impossible to see all things from a completely objective perspective. The reality is way too complex and it is impossible to know everything. And neither is it possible to eliminate all of our cognitive biases.

This is why each of us holds a model of the world in our head that abstracts away certain complexities of reality. And, as we saw before, it is not the model that represents the most accurate view of the world that is the best. Your model of reality is better than someone else’s if it serves you better than theirs serves them. The accuracy of the model may or may not correlate with it.

Having an exceptionally accurate model of reality does nothing other than feed your ego by making you know that you are more knowledgeable than others. This is why it sometimes pays to take advantage of your cognitive biases instead of eliminating them. And this is where the Law of Attraction comes into play as a great life hack.

How cognitive biases can be useful

Things are diverse in any economically developed society with a reasonable degree of economic freedom. There is poverty as well as wealth. Fitness is popular, even though there is also an obesity epidemic. Some places are completely run down, but there are also well-developed ones.

The conscious practice of the Law of Attraction will create some cognitive biases by making you focus on those aspects of reality that you prefer and ignore the ones that you don’t. And if you keep telling yourself that there are plenty of opportunities around you to have the life you want, you will suddenly start seeing all these opportunities that you have not been noticing before. Likewise, you will stop seeing the reasons why you may fail. You will train your mind to filter them out of your conscious perception.

Both the good and the bad have always existed in the objective reality. All that happened is that your focus has shifted, so you are only focusing on the things that serve you. Whether the universe really responds to your innermost thoughts, is up to you to conclude. However, believing so will certainly help.

Many celebrities swear by the Law of Attraction. This is the belief that allowed Conor McGregor to get from abject poverty to being one of the best-paid MMA fighters. If you truly believe that you will attract anything you focus on, it will make you put all of the required work to achieve this.

Working hard is not pleasant by any means. In itself, hard work is not what people want. They mainly do it because they believe that it will lead to something much more desirable. This is why believing that you can get anything you want, regardless of your current circumstances, will motivate you to take any necessary action to get there.

How a lack of cognitive biases may derail your success

Sometimes people who don’t believe that they can achieve what they want also work hard. Perhaps, they have “realistically” evaluated their chances based on statistics, and, even though they believe their chance of success to be very low, they decided to try anyway.

However, more often than not, working hard while having this negative attitude yields no positive results and only makes people more resentful. After all, if you are in this state, you have already programmed your subconscious mind to sabotage your efforts, even when you are doing your best consciously (or, at least, you think you are). So, in the end, you aren’t working hard to achieve a great life for yourself, but rather to prove to yourself and the world that it really cannot be done.

Of course, there are situations where having a cognitive bias related to a particular issue is disadvantageous, but they are probably not as prevalent as some people want you to believe. For example, when your career depends on an objective understanding of a particular area, this is where you should eliminate all cognitive biases related to that area.

For example, a strongly-held belief that you have above-average software development skills and therefore don’t need to add any tests to your code would be a thing that can inconvenience your employer and hurt your long-term career prospects. On the other hand, believing that the IT industry has an abundant job market and that you are good enough to secure one of the top-paying jobs would make it easier for you to spot such opportunities even if they are objectively rare and the whole job market is suffering. It’s a good cognitive bias to have.

Wrapping up

When you think like a hacker, widely accepted conventions and preconceived notions don’t matter. You have a goal in mind and you will use any tool at your disposal to achieve this goal.

If somebody tells you that certain things must be done in a certain way, you don’t just accept it as a fact. You will question why things have to be done this way. And if you don’t find a good answer (and there aren’t any adverse consequences for sticking with the protocol, you will find a better way to do things.

This way of thinking can be summarized in the following phrase:

Unless there is a speed camera, the speed limit doesn’t apply.