First of all, I want to say that media ruined the word "hacker" for me. They should learn to call them "crackers", as the real hacker community calls them, to avoid confusing people. As I've rarely heard or seen any mentions about the hacker community and seen many news about crackers, this will take some time to get used to.
"How To Become A Hacker" written by Eric S. Raymond actually inspired me to try and become a hacker myself even though that would mean to change quite a bit about my mindset and habits. As someone who knew little about the existence of the hacker community, I think that it is great that it exists. This document does a good job at describing what hackers are, their mindset and if you have what it takes to become one. What's actually fascinating is that hacker's mindset is not only applicable to programming but many other things like science, music and art.
The second believe in the section about hacker's attitude - "No problem should ever have to be solved twice" makes a really good point about what hacker community does. They share their work with each other so they can focus on things that are yet to be solved instead of wasting time on solving something that was already solved. As Eric said "Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource" and they should be used to work on new problems that haven't been tackled yet.
Raymond also makes some interesting statements regarding non-computer related activities. Reading science fiction, training in martial-arts forms, studying a meditation discipline or developing an appreciation for puns and wordplay (especially this last one) as he says can help you enter the hacker mindset. And I do agree with that but these activities are also quite good at taking your mind straight where you need it even if you are not striving to become a hacker.
If you want to become a hacker or just want to know more about the real hackers and what they do, I would definitely recommend you to read this document as it contains very valuable information and is on point. You should also don't forget to read the FAQ section.
Source: How To Become A Hacker by Eric Steven Raymond
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