Simplification

I personally think simplification can be really helpful, especially when you’re learning something like cybersecurity or IT in general.

Nowadays, there are so many new technologies, tools, and concepts coming out, and a lot of them can get complicated really fast. As a beginner, one of the hardest parts is just trying to understand all the technical words and acronyms. Sometimes you search up the definition of something, and the definition itself has five other words you don’t understand. Then you search those up too, and suddenly you have 15 tabs open just trying to understand one thing.

That’s why I think simplifying things at the beginning is actually a good thing. You don’t always need to know exactly how something works internally when you first learn about it. Sometimes you just need to know what it is, what it does, and why people use it.

If you’re learning networking, you don’t need to know everything about TCP/IP on day one. First, you can understand the basic idea of how devices communicate with each other. Once that makes sense, learning the more technical parts becomes a lot easier because you already have something to connect them to.

Cybersecurity too. There are so many terms like hashing, encryption, authentication, protocols, vulnerabilities, firewalls, and so on. If someone explains all of these in the most technical way possible from the beginning, it can make the subject feel way harder than it actually is.

You can't or shouldn’t stay with the simplified version forever. The point is to use it as a starting point. You understand the simple version first, then slowly go deeper and learn the proper terminology and technical details.

For me, that’s one of the best ways to learn IT. Understand the simple version first, then figure out what’s actually happening underneath.