Sure, but what I'm saying that that statement is almost meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Is not letting your ego get in the way a necessary part of getting to mastery? Absolutely. But no matter how much you change your thought process, or analyze the problem, you still need to eat the proverbial whale.

Think of all the people who've ever played basketball and have had any aspirations of joining the NBA. For the vast, vast majority of them, they just were never going to be good enough. They didn't have the talent. It didn't matter how much they practiced, how much they got their ego out of the way, how badly they wanted it. Only about 3,000 people have ever played in the NBA.

Now, I'm not saying you need to be in the NBA to be a "successful" basketball player, or whatever you want to call the equivalent of that for programming. What I'm saying is that everyone has ceilings for how good they can become at something. Maybe on the relative scale, the best you can ever be is a pretty good programmer, and that's it. No shame in that!

After all, part of Zen Budhism is accepting who you are and your limitations.