To be great, be good at more than one thing
Most of the time the thinking goes: focus on one thing relentlessly to the detriment of just about everything else, and you will break through. It’s a mentality borne from the persuasive 10,000 hours observation and the emotional high of success through perseverance that has survived at least 2,345 years of theater.
One path to greatness at software development is to be good at other things, too. Just as its good practice to give another developer a problem you’ve exhausted your thinking on, to benefit from “a fresh set of eyes”, setting your mind to another exercise requiring skill and patience allows you to revisit your own work, to be your own fresh set of eyes on a problem. If you’ve ever experienced reading something you wrote long ago, and seeing it as a first time reader, you will understand how this works.
If only to achieve balance, it might be time to dust off an old hobby.
Your “other thing” is usually a hobby, but it can be related generally to your work. For example, I know a developer who is also quite talented in business development, and another who enjoys salesmanship. Both of these skills have their own disciplines, heroes, and trials that are separate from the specific skill of creating software.
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