I'm sure someone has posted this, but this is my ideas on hacking, and just briefly explaining it.
I. HackingHacking is not only breaching servers, stealing financial information, or swatting someone's home. Hacking is having intellectual interest into technology, but the word, "hacking" is a very broad word. It's hard to constitute it, the word hacking is an idea, requires a mindset, a mentality. You do not need to be incredibly smart in math or science to learn how to program, or hack. You need to be patient and be willing to listen and learn, and the most important thing, to accept criticism, accept it, learn from your mistakes. Hacking and programming takes a long time, and you'll never know everything, you'll never be the best, there will always be someone better than you, someone to point you out on mistakes, you need to just accept it, and learn from it.
II. HackersThere are different types of hackers, hackers with different intents. Essentially it's based up in two groups, ethical and bad hackers. But specifically there are three groupes of hackers, white-hat, grey-hat, black-hat. But a hacker can always be independent, no need to set yourself into one of the groups if it doesn't fit your style, and your intents.
White-hat hackers are generally the people with good intentions, to help and inform the less educated individuals, they are more likely to help you out with computers, they usually have good morals. And make software to help you out, they pentest with authorization. They stop bad hackers, they work for companies and possibly the governments.
These people usually have mixed intentions, sometimes they'll help you out, mostly for money. They'll help you for something legal or illegal. They might do a prank, which could be illegal. Or they might be hired to pentest a website. Grey-hat is essentially a mix of white-hat and black-hat.
These hackers have only bad intentions, they have no intent to help you out, or do some legal pentesting. They'll attack for the reasons of, financial gain, political reasons, or for a laugh. They'll go after you, they'll always be a bug to the hacking community, they'll always be a problem to society.