I haven't mastered the art of programming, and I've been programming for 40 years! "Mastery" eludes most of us because programming has a very, very high skill

I haven't mastered the art of programming, and I've been programming for 40 years! "Mastery" eludes most of us because programming has a very, very high skill ceiling. No matter how good you get in one aspect, there are other aspects that you still have a long way to go in before you get proficient. Don't worry about mastery. Leave that to Knuth and John Carmack. Get good enough to build that thing you want, and then see how you can build it better (or a more complex thing). If you were meant to be a master, mastery will come if you follow the path, and you may not even know it when it does.