If you don't feel like you have a hopeless amount of stuff left to learn you are either a unicorn or the opposite. In this field people who think they know ever

If you don't feel like you have a hopeless amount of stuff left to learn you are either a unicorn or the opposite. In this field people who think they know everything are almost always just oblivious to the fact that they are incompetent. Yea, there are minor Internet celebs in the security industry that seem like gods to most of us, but most of the ones I've spoken to also struggle with imposter syndrome. At the very least they are usually humble. However, I think there is a small percentage of very vocal people in the community that engage in an eternal dick measuring competition on twitter and elsewhere. They take up enough of the attention to make a lot of us anxious about our own accomplishments. Passion is the greatest indicator of success in most endeavors, security research included. You seem to have it. I'd say you are likely far more skilled than you give yourself credit for. Perhaps what you really need help with is figuring out a strategy that helps you pivot into a role where you can spend more time on what you love. Something that helped me early on was actually a comment on HN. tptacek responded to a comment of mine and said something along the lines of "There is probably less that separates the two of us than you think there is." Instead of thinking that I wasn't good enough it got me thinking of how to close the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be. I'm still no industry celeb, I haven't published any white papers, and I haven't discovered any zero days, but I do get to work on cool stuff on a regular basis that actually helps people.