New Year, Better Goal Planning

I'm writing this at the last minute before Jan. 1, as you can see. I don't do well with yearly goals outside of my birthday. Instead of doing like everyone else and telling you what I hope to accomplish, I'm going to tell you how I'm planning to tackle my previous goal list.

Goal 1: Good Grades

This is a solid goal for me. I didn't like my performance my first time around in grad school. I didn't fail out but it wasn't up to my normal Kevin standards. This time I have a nice planner, I have gotten better with my gcal use, and I have talked to my manager about changing my schedule if needed to accommodate after the first few weeks.

I'm still going to run a few side businesses along side the 9-5 but I'm going to be efficient about it. I only signed up with one course this semester so I can see how this goes. I shouldn't fall too hard on my face if I do my part and sleep for 5hrs minimum M-F.

Goal 2: Sec+

No I didn't take my test like I planned this month. I'm just going to be straight with you, I couldn't. I was cramming 2 chapters a week into my head and then other things kept popping up. I was learning security stuff and asking questions BUT I wasn't learning learning. I did ok-ish on practice test but I shouldn't have struggled so much to understand so then it was just like "don't clown yourself. Take this L and start over". So starting at the end of the week I'm going to do more flashcards at lunch, 1hr of focused reading every day and testing every weekend.

Goal 3: CCNA

This is more of a new goal but after the Sec+ is completed I'm going to just move straight over to CCNA. Same study schedule.

Goal 4: Hacking

I had this bug bounty goal on my list but I realize that is an added bonus, but not the real goal. I want to be a better grey hat hacker and ultimately an asset to anybody's blue team. I'm going to achieve this by going back through hacker101 ctfs, pico ctf, over the wire, and finally hack the box. For every success I want to do a write up and post it on here. A big part of infosec is being able to write out what the issue is so someone can replicate it so the more practice the better I can get.

Goal 5: OSP

This is the last and hardest goal I'm looking at. This goal will be the ultimate test for me because I like to sleep a lot and you get a whole day to hack 5 boxes. How am I going to avoid just sleeping? Well, I'm hoping my discipline from the other task transfer over so I will be able to make it through a normal day when the time comes without knocking out on the couch. Also my work with hack the box (HTB) will be very important here. By the time I'm ready to sit for this I'd like to have 5 solid HTB reports on this here blog.

Well that's it. Those are the goals and some ideas on how to achieve them within the next year. You might wondering "do you really need the certs if you are getting a MS?" eh...yes and no. I will definitely need Sec+ for a non-hacking related goal but all the other stuff aren't bad to have as I dig deep into security.