You can’t know everything, but you should convince yourself that you can know anything. – John Carmack
To excel you must struggle. Push the boundaries of your knowledge, explore the black boxes that seemed magical to you.
Reinvent the wheel - it helps you understand the wheel. It helps you to find out why certain solutions were chosen to be the today’s main stream. Try building http server. You will learn more by doing that in a weekend rather than for just using the complete solutions over years. Take the time to understand things. It will open many opportunities.
And my most sacred desire: game engine. Someone could say: why? Another game engine? There are thousands! But the actual point - to understand. To crank through all the challenges required to build a renderer, object system, animation system, physics, editor. It should give much-much better insight over the things happening in the mainstream game engines, rather than by just using them over years.
Most people will follow an easy path - and no judgement to them - they do the right thing, given their life background, priorities and available time. But to be among the best of the craft - you must push the limits. You either chose the normal life, or you put everything on the stake.
Path to be one of the best is very hard. Classical high risk and high reward. I myself haven’t yet fully understood how hard it could be. And what’s the point? Money? They can be made in much-much easier (and legal!) ways. In just sufficient amount to live the normal low-risk life.
What was the motivation of the best masters of the craft? I think: passion. Not the childish desire “ama goin to be da best”, but true passion. Unlimited curiousity for the new things. Desire to know, to understand. I suppose many of them not even thought about being at the top - they just pushed forward, with bright ideas of changes they want to see in the world.