It's a question of keeping track of which is the map and which is the territory. The point, I believe, is to be continually and relentlessly introspective, aski

It's a question of keeping track of which is the map and which is the territory. The point, I believe, is to be continually and relentlessly introspective, asking yourself how you can do better today than yesterday (and having a realistic view of what 'better' is). Deliberate practice can be helpful in forcing such introspection, if you let it. If you just go through the motions, it won't help much, certainly not sustained. You end up with cargo-culting. The classic example is the GoF Design Patterns book - it was a very good book, at least at it's time, you could expand your horizons a lot by reading it, and get a lot of tricks up your sleeve to deal with certain tricky, but relatively common, situations. But if you start actively to impose design patterns on code that doesn't need it so you can tell yourself (or your peers or whoever might listen) that you're a design patterns kind of guy, you end up with overly complex and hard to read (ie: bad) code.