[from-nibly]

The article is arguing just that. There is no great consistently and yes you do achieve whatever level Terence Tao is at by being good and improving consistently.

Software is a particularly good form of this. You can't really just vomit out a codebase that's perfect immediately. If we could do that then there wouldn't be so many versions of even the most mundane tools on your computer.

Even though when you look at a great piece of spftware you can just look ay the whole completed thing, it didn't just pop into existence that way. It was honed over time.