I like to think that successful people of all professions owe it to their methods (and then there is pure "luck" too). E.g., Seinfeld has been known to improve

I like to think that successful people of all professions owe it to their methods (and then there is pure "luck" too). E.g., Seinfeld has been known to improve his skills on a daily basis, and is still able to deliver highly successful products (e.g., he wrote "Bee Movie", a surprise hit movie). Might be that his daily improvement has nothing to do with it, but you can never make much of anecdotes anyway. There is an app for that which I like to use: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8 Einstein said something like "I owe many of my achievements to my persistence, not letting go of my goal until I achieve it" (Nash proved later that keeping to a strategy [= persistence] increases chances of winning a game), and Feynman has been known as a big advocate of the scientific method per se. Again, hard to say whether they owe their Nobel prizes to these methods, but I like to think that they helped. Methods are actions gone habits. If you force yourself to think "Is this really right?" before coming to a conclusion, you will soon do it automatically. As a programmer, you could build up the habit of understanding the system you are currently operating in, before fixing or enhancing a part of it. Or you could write a pseudo-code script using your API (or testcases ;)) before implementing it, to get a grasp of what your users will actually use it for. You can make it a habit to blank out program areas in your mind which you don't currently need, to reduce cognitive load and turn a greater focus on the problem at hand (which will also enforce modularization automatically). There are many such methods (also including getting more focus out of your worktime etc.), and they can become habits if you execute them for long enough. Habits are everywhere, and the (IMO) most crucial ones are hidden in how we think, and our thoughts eventually ensue our actions.