“Developing games for the PC and consoles is all about everything and the kitchen…” — John Carmack

To this day, I run into people all the time that say, whether it was 'Doom', or maybe even more so 'Quake' later on, that that openness and that ability to get into the guts of things was what got them into the industry or into technology.

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

It is a shame that homebrew development can't be officially sanctioned and supported, because it would be a wonderful platform for a modern generation of programmers to be able to get a real feel for low level design work, to be contrasted with the high level web and application work that so many entry level people start with.