This is a relatively common question for early-career developers. It is not a question which is formed well enough to give you a specific answer. Some ways whi

This is a relatively common question for early-career developers. It is not a question which is formed well enough to give you a specific answer. Some ways which might refine one's thinking on goals: What does it mean to be the "best"? Is it synonymous with foremost? Is that your real terminal goal, mastery for its own sake, or are you motivated by another goal (e.g. social acclaim by peers or easy employability) which have easier ladders to climb or levers to pull than technical mastery. What is your field? From a marketing/sales perspective, the easiest way to be the best X in your field is to constrain the set of people competing with you by applying multiple independent low-pass filters to your definition of a field. For example, if you're in the top 50% of programmers you know, but you have no other information, you're astoundingly unlikely to be the best programmer in e.g. compilers. You have a surprisingly good shot if you attempt to be the best bilingual Japanese/English programmer working in fintech frontends, a field which is commercially relevant to many companies' interest and probably has four people in it. (I do not think my estimation is off here by an order of magnitude or more.) Non-specific advice on getting better at things: Work with people who are good at the things you want to get better at. Aggressively optimize for skills growth. Write about what you learn; use that to expose yourself to opportunities to work with people who are better than you at them.