I am only speaking for myself and I am most definitely not a pro, but I think preoccupation with efficiency and usefulness is the main obstacle to actually liking programming, which is itself a must if you want to get good at it. Some years ago I read an article with the title 'why I spend my time writing useless software'. I can't remember what it actually said since I only needed the title to really internalise the fact that programming is an art. Imagine telling Monet, Picasso, Michelangelo or John Lennon that their line of work is 'imperfect' or 'inefficient'. If that sounds like a ridiculous thing to do, that's because it would be. I've written at least 15,000 lines of code (I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer), most of it for production in banking systems. And yet, the piece of software I'm most proud of is...a library for encoding and decoding morse.