Hone your craft constantly - hold yourself accountable to keep learning over time and strive to know more than everyone else about your particular craft. “I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s quite doable to be the most knowledgeable”.
Discussion
Take every chance you can to find somebody who can teach you about the field you want to excel in and also embrace peers in your field. Bill gives great advice on how to actually go about doing this [hint: being on X is a great start].
Finally always give majority of the credit to other people that helped you along the way and make sure to eventually pay it back.