[armchairhacker]

I think you need both intrinsic talent / motivation and external guidance.

Like with research, nobody can take arithmetic and single-handedly discover calculus, number theory, and higher concepts. You're not going to discover good software development paradigms without reading about some of them. You especially can't write anything useful without using high-level libraries and working with others.

At the same time, I think intrinsic motivation significantly helps learning these concepts. To some random person, learning about "one function one purpose" could be like learning random historical dates to me. "Why can't I just copy / paste the code? Why do I need good function names?" These people would have to discipline themselves and power through learning this stuff. But to me, I didn't have to discipline myself, because for some reason I was genuinely interested in writing "clean" code and making my development more efficient. This gave me an advantage. And there are people who love writing code more than I do, so when I get tired and brain fog after a couple hours they keep writing.

[jfoutz]

Well, Euler, and maybe Ramanujan.

I'm not them. It's better to assume we all need help and direction. Just about everyone I've ever worked with has had a beautiful insight or three. The real trick seems to be finding a process that produces good enough results that isn't so soul-crushing that it extinguishes those rare brilliant insights.

[peterburkimsher]

Even Isaac Newton had the humility to thank others for their help. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...

Academic citations work the same way: saying thank you to the people who helped builds their reputation, and is a positive-feedback cycle of growth and joy. Thank you jfoutz for humbly saying that you also need help and direction; me too.

[philipswood]

You need to add Gauss, who basically figured out arithmetic on his own the way he tells it, but you probably need to remove Ramanujan. Yes, he was brilliant and self-taught with the proper material as inspiration, but where he ended up wasn't understandable to other mathematicians and neither where they to him.