First off, look at some of your older code. How recently can you go back and look at some of your older stuff and thing, "Wow! I wouldn't write it like that now

First off, look at some of your older code. How recently can you go back and look at some of your older stuff and thing, "Wow! I wouldn't write it like that now!"? If it's not more than a year or two ago, then you're a constantly improving developer and I wouldn't be too concerned. However if you're still writing things exactly the same way 5 years later, you're either not learning, or you've got some awesome niche where you're almost the only VBA developer in your town and you're charging out at $1000+/day. ;-) For me, probably 90% of the time, I love programming for the fact that there's always cool stuff to learn. But the other 10% of the time, I hate programming because you've always got to learn new stuff. (only half-joking... so it's realistically 5%) It's an awesome field to be part of. You don't necessarily need to compare yourself to the gurus. I'll never ever be a Carmack/Torvolds/Knuth... But in my field, I'm pretty decent and am appreciated by my clients. And the day I stop learning is the day I'm dead.