How to avoid burnouts in bugbounty?

AssalamuAlaikum(Peace be upon you) everyone! after a quite long break I’m publishing a new writeup and you know what’s it about.

There’s a very common issues among beginners as well as expert hunters. And that is burnout!

Everybody faces this. Basically, when you keep doing anything over and over again without getting any good result, you feel exhausted and emotionally drained about the work. This is completely natural.

Now let’s talk about the burnouts specifically in bug bounties. If you’re feeling like bug bounty isn’t for you or feeling like you can’t continue this journey, you can’t do anything good in this, then most likely you’re going through a burnout phase. I know how it feels. But everyone goes through it, even the top ranked hunters. Recently I’ve been going through that phase but the good thing is I’m recovering again. So how can you avoid burnouts while doing bug bounty?

Well, I’d like to point out some techniques that may help you avoid or recover this.

People start bug bounties with full of excitements but as the time goes and start getting N/A, Duplicates, Informative reports, they get demotivated and loses the joy they started with. You can’t do good or feel good by doing something you don’t find exciting/interesting. Why so serious dude? Take it easy. Make it fun by keep exploring new technologies, try to hunt with friends. Don’t have bug bounty friends? So what? We’re always here! Start communicating other hunters of similar level & mindset. Collaboration makes it really fun.

Maybe you wanna get some money ASAP but it doesn’t work like that. Even you do know that good things take time and bug bounty can’t be mastered overnight. You must have patience. I know this doesn’t seem a good point to avoid burnouts. But really you need to setup your mind in such a way. You can challenge yourself not to lose patience. You need to promise yourself that “you’re not stopping until you achieve your goal and you can wait a thousand years for it to achieve.” Maybe this can trigger some people otherwise. So don’t get driven by this right now and read other points as well.

I’ve seen people expecting the unexpected. Yeah you should do that but withing some conditions. You don’t know nothing about robotics and you set a goal to build up an advanced humanoid robot withing 3days. Isn’t it just a day dream? I’m not saying it’s impossible but you can’t get expected good result every time setting this type of goals. Which can lead you to frustration and make you demotivated. So instead of that, you could set up small goals to achieve the expected result. Like first few days you learn AI or machine learning, then the electronics, then learn how to program those and so on so forth. This way you can easily achieve your small goals and move towards the final result gradually. This will make the work fun and make it interesting by watching yourself improving day by day. Same thing with bug bounty. You set small goals that you’re gonna spend at least “X” amount of time this week on hunting. And once done that, set goal to report at least one bug this week. This is how you continue.

You should have something else except of bug bounty. For example I was feeling demotivated after not finding anything for a long time. So I moved over learning hardware hacking and came back to bug bounty after some time. But still wasn’t feeling good. So decided to give some time on my favorite hobby, “Aviation” and started playing flight simulator and learn new concepts. After a long break I felt the urge to start hunting again. If you like only the tech world or have more interests in it other than anything then try to explore other concepts like play CTF, learn new vulns, solve some more advanced labs, research other hunters’ methodologies etc.

Stop it dude! What happened? Take a break now! You can’t be 100% all the time. Everybody needs a break. Have a vacation, hangout with your families and friends. Spend some time in nature. Reboot your mind. If you think none of these techniques listed till now isn’t working for you then take a break from everything and enjoy some time outside this tech world and come back stronger again.

That’s it for today. Oh yeah, forgot to mention another thing. Don’t forget to kills the distractions which may have been killing your bug bounty potential. Even if you don’t believe in you, I do! You can do it!

Keep me in your prayers and good wishes. Come back stronger. Allah hafiz! And remember: