You might be interested in John Carmack's recent interview on Lex Fridman's podcast. He'd probably be one of the leading candidates for "best programmer".
One thing that's common to people who are unreasonably great at something is that they do it a lot. Like, an order of magnitude more than what a normal person would consider reasonable. For Carmack that was pumping out a new game every week when he was working for a mail-order software company before he became famous. Everyone talks about how the Beatles played tons and tons of shows all over Germany before they made it big. Great comedians go on the road and hone their acts in thousands of clubs until they have something that can be a comedy special.
Quantity has a quality all its own and you have to just experience a lot of variations and run into a lot of different situations and try lots of different things to become really good.
Note, as others have pointed out, this may not be the same thing as having a happy and fulfilling life and the things you want to spend your time doing might change as you get older, but also, they might not. Best of luck.
One thing that's common to people who are unreasonably great at something is that they do it a lot. Like, an order of magnitude more than what a normal person would consider reasonable. For Carmack that was pumping out a new game every week when he was working for a mail-order software company before he became famous. Everyone talks about how the Beatles played tons and tons of shows all over Germany before they made it big. Great comedians go on the road and hone their acts in thousands of clubs until they have something that can be a comedy special.
Quantity has a quality all its own and you have to just experience a lot of variations and run into a lot of different situations and try lots of different things to become really good.
Note, as others have pointed out, this may not be the same thing as having a happy and fulfilling life and the things you want to spend your time doing might change as you get older, but also, they might not. Best of luck.