I don't know about Lisp making me a top-percentile programmer but I do know learning Lisp has improved my skills (not mastering, of course, but becoming comfort

I don't know about Lisp making me a top-percentile programmer but I do know learning Lisp has improved my skills (not mastering, of course, but becoming comfortable reading & writing code in it). I also feel what I've read from SICP has helped massively too. For one, recursion. I 'got' it as far as the fact it's a function calling itself but it was only through digesting Lisp books, writing lisp and talking about Lisp that I finally got it. SICP helped further with recursive-iterative stuff too - it doesn't just need to call itself to be recursive. Another is functional programming. There are many more but the point is that I could have learned all these concepts, mentioned or not, in other languages but it was the simplicity of Lisp that I feel allowed me to truly understand them. I also feel if I dedicated more time into Lisp, I'd get much more than just a new language out of it.