Example masters: John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Bram Cohen. What do they do? I think they're all extremely effective at getting things done. So be smart, hard working, and laser focused on shipping.
A long time ago I saw a good talk by Jonathan Blow wherein he made a point that really resonated with me. The point was that to get good at programming you need the experience of shipping a lot of programs and thus you should optimize your career around shipping as many good programs as you can. Contrast this with the common advice of being an expert in databases, or distributed systems, or OOP, or testing, or something like that...
To play devils advocate. Perl 6 is an example of where not shipping was a major contributor to the decline of the language. Shame, as it looks interesting.
If you think it looks interesting, you should have a look at Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). Looks familiar? It should be, as it is the new name of Perl 6. It now also comes with an IDE (https://commaide.com) if you're so inclined :-)
A long time ago I saw a good talk by Jonathan Blow wherein he made a point that really resonated with me. The point was that to get good at programming you need the experience of shipping a lot of programs and thus you should optimize your career around shipping as many good programs as you can. Contrast this with the common advice of being an expert in databases, or distributed systems, or OOP, or testing, or something like that...
Edit: found the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM