Are good programmers just born that way?!

So, I used to think I was a decent programmer. I've been reading up on things like Core Data, concurrency, dependency injection, multi-threading, etc, & have come to the conclusion that I'm just stupid & should find another field of work, like Customer Service.

I have friends who know all of this stuff, & I just wonder if they were just born smarter? I have been doing programming for about 10 years & have realized that I learned essentially nothing in all that time.

There's no college classes in my area that teach this, & have read/own many programming books that never touched on any subjects even remotely similar to these kinds of things.

Where do we learn this stuff?!

How do you deal with all things you don't know?

At what point should you decide to cut your losses & move on?

Good programmers are good be cause we/they do it a lot. To become an expert at something, it takes about 10000 hours of practice. If you've been practicing learning, problem solving, math, software architecture, and abstraction you will get really good at that. If you've been practicing customizing pre-made package A for customer Z, you'll get really good at that instead.

The reason good programmers practice so much is because we/they enjoy it. Push yourself. Explore. Do new things. Then redo them until you really get it.