Learn365 Challenge Review & Year 2021 in a Nutshell

Learning is an essential factor irrespective of your domain, level of expertise and experience. It helps one to constantly improve their skills, keep creativity flowing and stay one step ahead of the competition.

During the end of the year 2020, I planned to create a Goal Matrix for the next year, i.e. the year 2021 and tried to fit multiple things that involved Learning, Community Engagement, Professional Growth, Certification, Personal Growth & Development among others things. Looking at other people posting about 100dayschallenge and similar challenges, an idea of continuous learning came into my mind where I planned to learn something new daily irrespective of the domain and named it Learn365.

Learn365

Initially, the idea was to learn anything whether it be hacking, cooking, photography, soft skills, or any life lesson but keep the flame of knowledge intake burning. However, on the very first day of this challenge, I shared a MindMap that I created on Multi-Factor Authentication Bypass Techniques and it got a very good response from the community.

Looking at the response, I continued sharing my daily learnings via Twitter Threads and it got a pretty nice engagement ratio and people asked me to gather the resource at someplace like GitHub.

From that point in time, I started sharing the learnings on Twitter threads and keep updating the Learn365 GitHub Repository. At the point of writing this blog, this challenge is almost completed and only 9 days are left.

Learning Experience from Learn365:

• During this challenge, I came across plenty of interesting resources, tools, labs and talks that enabled me to step up my security testing.
• It helped me be consistent with my goals. I kept on reading/learning something even on my busiest day of life.
• It allowed me to build a strong and better learning habit. This enabled me to keep myself open to learning every time something new or interesting comes up.
• It helped me build better communication and interaction with the application security community.

Other Goals Achieved during the Year 2021:

• Finished my Education Loan
• Purchased a New Flat
• Got 2 New Certifications
• Moved to Sr. Security Consultant Rank
• Became Team Lead in Cobalt Core
• Achieved the goal of Earning $$$
• Finished Learn365 Challenge
• Got Married (Unplanned)
• Finished reading 10 motivational Books
• Finished 100% of the personal goals
• Finished 100% of the other professional goals
• Published more than 10 Blogs
• Presented at more than 20 events, conferences and meetups (all virtual)
• and other small & side goals.

Plans for the Year 2022

With the new year starting, I am ready to take upon new challenges with more enthusiasm than before. I am adding the plans for next year in this blog for my own records and to remember what I have committed to sharing with the community and fulfilling them.

Project: Security Explained

While project Learn365 is now completed, I will not continue this challenge for the next year but will come up with another learning-based project Security Explained. The idea behind this project is to take up different items from the application security domain, break them down into basic terms and share them with the community in different forms including:

• Tweets
• Micro Blogs / Content Snippet
• Mind Maps
• Podcasts/Twitter Space
• Talks
• Blogs
• GitHub Repository
• Newsletter [Yet to confirm]

Note: I will continue my learning and share them but that will be less frequent compared to the #learn365 challenge.

Apart from that, there are some other areas where I am planning to work next year are:

• 1.5x earning compared to this year
• 3 new certifications
• Learning about Containers, Cloud & Hardware Hacking
• International Travel
• Multiple Talks
• Multiple Blogs
• Better Community Engagement
• and some uncooked, unshaped goals that will get into shape as we start into next year.

Well, you heard about my experience of this year and plans for the next year, but here’s why you should set and chase your goals:

• It creates a competitive mindset and enables you to work smart in the right direction to achieve your goals on/before time.
• It enables you to be focused on what you want from your next day, week, month and year.
• You can plan your other activities, free-time and important stuff easily.
• When you finish your one goal on/before time, it gives you the motivation to go higher and finish the rest of them and sometimes even more than what you planned.
• Obviously, it helps you to stay organized and track how you are doing in different areas of your life.

The tool that I use for Goal Tracking is Trello.

In the end, I want to thank you all for supporting me and my work, appreciating it and standing by my side. It kept me motivated even when the time was not favourable. I wish you all a very happy new year in advance and looking forward to sharing more things from my experience and connecting with all of you.

Thank you for reading. Happy Holidays. Happy New Year.