How To Become A Good Penetration Tester (seriously)

Okay i am a noob who have absolutely no programming knowledge but I always wanted to become a great pentester. All my friends told me that programming is about mathematics and you need to do know mathematics to become a good programmer. I am not good with academics but I really want to become a good penetration tester in the field of network security. What should I learn if I want to become a great security enthusiast like snodan or may be a good computer security technician? What are the programming knowledges do I need to become one? When I ask this question keep in mind I've to make a living from it. So what are the things i should do ? I will dedicate my whole life on it :/ hope it doesn't deal with advanced mathematics .. You're on a site that will help you with that.. lol Simplest path is to pick a tool, and practice with it and get comfortable using it. Nmap and Burpsuite are a couple that I'd recommend you start with. Learn how to see what is available on a target, and what you can exploit. Burp should give you some decent leads on what the site may be susceptible to, then you can try to do some proof of concept exploits on that site. Also, check out portswigger's page on how to test for the OWASP top 10 using Burp: https://support.portswigger.net/customer/portal/articles/1969845-using-burp-to-test-for-the-owasp-top-ten Thats a decent way to start. Oh, and be sure to do that only on your own systems, or systems where you have authorization to test. Try to study basic programming, you don't really need to be that good in math. I'm a programmer but I really suck at math. Guess what? It should not stop you from doing what you want. Programming doesn't deal that much with math, but with logic. It's more like creating your own formula on how to deal with your problems. You need to know variables, loops, conditional statements, creating functions, etc. to become a programmer. In order to become a good penetration tester, you might need to know how it works under the hood. :D All I know is. If you hack the government. They'll find you like Master Yoda. You will disappear at age of 16. And become highly trained. But you'll never see daylight.