I mean like awareness that, just under the surface, there are deep explorations waiting for the right time and place to emerge; things you’ve set aside or placed on the back burner but will tackle eventually/many you already have tackled.
Are you deeply self aware of these interests like some kind of list? If so, are these interests deeply connected in your mind to your past explorations and interests like some kind of road map or branching tree structure of thought?
Regarding the assembly and cracking stuff, I’ve actually taught myself that (not RISC-V, but x86, arm, and a little mips and PPC). The way I did it, was largely practice by doing. Specifically, I tried to almost every weekend put some time into competing in CTFs. Focus on the reversing challenges, look for writeups on similar challenges, fail, and once the CTF has ended, read the writeups and try solving again. Rinse and repeat, each weekend you’ll slowly get better and better.
Additionally, start messing around with an assembly debugger. For me, being able to step through instruction by instruction and watch as the values of the registers change, made everything sort of click. Start with making your own program in c, then debug the assembly, and pay attention to how your c code got converted to assembly.
There’s also some decent books out there, I like NoStarch (there’s a malware book and also hacking: the art of exploitation, the malware book is more reverse engineering, but both should be decent starting points for assembly).
Btw, picoctf is a good starter one that is hosted year round.
This is exactly how assembly and reversing started to make sense for me as well. I just had to dive in for the words I was reading to start really making any sense.
I also agree on CTFs being a great entry point to getting those reps in. If you’re up for a challenge the Mandiant Flare-On CTF is a doozy. All the old CTF binaries are still up on the Flare-On site for anyone to grab and work through. The CTF is usually in the fall, September-ish I think? Definitely before Thanksgiving in the US, and the SANS Holiday Hack stuff.