Honestly I think the majority of my success in tech, outside of my cishet white woman privilege, comes from having high standards, and the perseverance to not compromise them when the work gets boring or tough.

A lot of work necessary to ship successful products is boring.
- Writing robust test cases, and maintaining them is boring
- Ensuring you meet compliance and privacy requirements is boring
- Adding a bunch of metrics and alerts can be tedious

- Doing large prod infra migrations is a grind
- Ensuring there are good docs and they stay update to date involves a lot of pedantic editing

There are a dozen more things, but these are all important to shipping high quality maintainable code bases

For me doing the design, research, and prototyping is the fun stuff. But that's only the tip of the iceberg, getting it to production requires a bunch of boring work, but that's what produces the business value.

Over the course of my career I've seen a bunch of engineers get stuck, only wanting to do the fun stuff.

The perseverance and willingness to tackle the boring stuff with high standards is rarer in engineers, and IME will accelerate your career.