I will give you one general advice about getting exceptional at anything which should also apply to programming. When you learn something, try to learn the "why" of it and not just the "what and "how". Once you master the "whys" of a topic, you will realize you have got really good at it already. Challenge yourself and others about conventions and understand why things are done a certain way. What if you try to do it differently ? Does that make sense ? Does it make it better or worse ?

When it comes to programming,learn to break things. In programming, it is easy. Put bad code on purpose and see how and why it breaks ? I remember one of our excellent CS professors who told us that the best way to learn pointers in C/C++ is to write pointers that don't work. Leak some memory. Create null references. I never understood that for a while but now I do.

Oh and the common advice: practice practice, practice. Do the same thing over and over again even if it is repetitive. Again to give you an example, I was really good at Math as a kid and I remember I got even better when one of the teachers gave me a book in which for every topic, there were 50+ questions that were very similar. he wanted me to do all 50 of them. I was like "why cannot I just do 3-4 of each type and move on to next". But again, after doing the 50, I mastered it.

Having said all this, I don't think I am exceptional at most of the things (certainly not programming) but I am so sure that these are some of the actions that makes one exceptional.