Suggestion I have is read up on Ethical Hacking by getting books on it. They are out there and I have a few of them. There are also websites on it, but books have so much more on it.
Plan on also reading on White, Grey, and Black Hat Hacking to be aware of where your place is in what you will be doing on your systems as well as you will then be aware of what is and isnt illegal etc.
If you dont already have computers other than the one that your on right now. I suggest getting at least two of them as a sandbox area to play around with offline on its own network that is not connected to the internet. A simple cross over cable can be used or they can be connected to a network switch.
Then find tools out there to try on your sandbox computers to exploit software vulnerabilities, memory injection, and all that fun stuff while not connected to the internet but connected on your private isolated network.
Most start off as script kiddie's and remain as such, some dig deeper into becoming computer programmers who are skilled in knowing how to gain control of and alter systems behavior through targeting memory with memory injection, overflow conditions, and altered local files that programs use that change the behavior of targeted programs such as programs that require dll libraries and a altered/replaced dll opens up greater control over a system.
If there are suggestions of setting up a honeypot. I would advise to avoid setting up a honeypot to fish for hackers to target a decoy system and leave behind scripts etc, as for you can get pulled into legal issues if that system compromised on the web on the DMZ is suddenly hosting illegal content as the hacker turned it into a FTP server with illegal content for others to download etc and now your the host of it.
