What are the best-kept secrets of great programmers?

This is something more people need to see since it's obvious most people, at least that I have met at university, don't get.

They ask me how I got good at this and I just tell them that I kept programming. They don't understand that concept, I get a strange look back every time.

This is totally true, the more I built the more I learned and stuff I never got in university just came to me after simply trying it in a small project.

You also have to know, what you can't do that takes looong time to learn. Stuff like distributed systems and cryptography is hard, so don't think it comes as easy as writing you first CRUD-app.

One more thing, they reflect upon what they do. It is not just constant practice, it is also about reflecting upon that.