Don't let people discourage you from expanding your knowledge in whatever area interests you. While some information may seem useless to others, you know you'll use it eventually. Let your curiosity feed your mind. One thing I found (which drives me crazy because there's soooo much great stuff I want to read) is a feature Google offers if you have an account. You can set up pages with feeds on topics you are interested in. I frequently look at the headlines on the tab pages I've set up and learn new stuff all the time. It is dangerous though, I've started some mornings on weekends just taking a peek at this stuff while having my coffee then find myself many hours later still exploring the things I've learned about.

This is a very good question, to which I would love to see good, solid answers. No doubt there are a great number of very experienced, highly talented, and intelligent programmers reading and writing for this site every day. If each of you thought about this problem, approached it like a programmer, and offer suggestions about what you believe would be traits of a super programmer, and how to develop those traits, then a plan for becoming a super programmer could be realized. I could say that a super programmer "thinks outside the box", but that doesn't do anything for anyone unless I suggest ways to do it. Maybe we could all be super programmers eventually if we all put our minds to documenting what works and what doesn't. (Oh, wait... documentation? Nah... It'll never work). I'll start by saying that a good programmer never uses GOTO. I haven't used GOTO in over a decade and I know through experience that if I were to use GOTO, the same routine could be written in a much more robust fashion without it. There is always a way around using GOTO, just restructure your approach and you'll find it. Ok, I've started with the most basic programming fundamental I could think of, aside from "always document your code". If others add to this, we may all benefit from it.