“Many people that truly accomplished amazing things, when asked for the key to their success come up with some framework or playbook that they, in fact, never used themselves.”
And they rarely share the messy awkward embarrassing reality of their journey.
This is why I'm not a big fan of "Things that any [insert career] should know" or "things I wish I'd known" type of articles. The path to mastering something is always unique, messy, and unstructured. It's impossible to replicate your journey by telling someone to read X, read Y, and do Z. All of that needs to be internalized as part of a slow journey that can't be accelerated too much. Your brain needs to learn how to filter noise, find patterns and get used to thinking a certain way. You might lose a year learning something that became obsolete; guess what? You still learned tons from that. We don't need to babysit junior people too much. They can find their way into becoming great SWE just like any great SWE who complains they learned something too late in their careers or that nobody told them something before did.
And they rarely share the messy awkward embarrassing reality of their journey.