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Comment by toolslive | Hacker News Reader

I think you become great by accident, as a side effect of solving difficult problems with great tenaciousness and energy.

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It helps to hang around with people smarter/more skilled than you.

One risk with doing things in isolation is hitting a local maxima. That is, getting really good using an approach that will only get you so far before super-human effort is required. For example, mastering VB 6.

It really helps when there are others who have gone ahead and made assorted mistakes to tell you when you may be following a poor path.

Absolutely this. Being around people smarter and more experienced than you will result in you constantly learning, trying to keep up, expanding your world view and understanding, and being reminded that there are things beyond your ken.

If you want to become better, but do not find yourself periodically challenged (or at least stretched a little), look for additional opportunities to do so.

I agree. I also wonder if many of the great programmers would consider themselves great?

Probably not. A certain hubris, as Mr. Wall has noted, is a Good Thing, but so is some amount of discontent or feeling that you've still a lot to learn.

I'm sure the Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play here.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

Thinking you're great before you are, in fact, great, will surely hold you back.

You need to think about sampling as well.. how good (you think) you are depends a lot on who you are comparing yourself to. Like those who were top of their class in school ... then went to a top-flight university and were shocked to find out that they were struggling at the bottom of their new peer-group. It is easy to think that you are the bees' knees when you are surrounded by jaded, cynical and burnt-out engineers, and you still have the energy and naive optimism of youth.

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