A good coder?

Sounds like some kind of OCD obsessive, or the plot to a bad sci-fi movie. Hinge your existence on your code? What does that even mean? I code therefore I am? How good is "good enough", anyway? It's quite possible to churn out decent code without it being the hinge of one's existence.

The same comment goes on to say "When you jump of the cliff their is exponential growth before you hit the ground. When its time to pay bills well climb back up the cliff when you get to the top of it you will find your self much further." so there's either an awful lot being lost in translation, or this is someone to whom coherent thought does not come easily.

From just the quote you provided it sounds like he's being melodramatic, but with the full comment + the post I think he's saying you'll only get to be a good enough coder if you try to support yourself solely from your coding efforts.

Plenty of examples to counter that, although it might be true for some. Having to get good fast in order to put food on the table certainly sounds like it'd be motivating, although in a way I'd find unpleasant.

I wonder why people worry about how good <anything> they are. Isn't life all about continuously improving yourself and using whatever skills you have to create value for yourself and this world? Doesn't matter how good/bad you are there is always room for improvement.

"Dealing with failure is easy: work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: you've solved the wrong problem; work hard to improve." - Alan Perlis

I feel that code accompanies intuition and design. Code should be a way of expressing these ideas to a computer. High efficiency code is not what drives a successful start-up , ideas are