Becoming a great programmer

How exactly does one becomes a great programmer?

I mean, can you become one or are you born that way? I remember going through high school and college hanging out in the computer lab, trying to do my own stuff; I kept envying the programming stars. No matter what I did, they were doing things that were at least 10 times more complicated and 20 times cooler! I had just learned C or Pascal by myself only to discover that they had know those languages for years and were working on tapping into the interrupt system of the OS to make a mouse cursor move on the screen. I had just learned photon mapping only to realize that they had already programmed their own C compiler.

Sheesh...

It is very disheartening to see other people learn faster than you and it really forces me to think about how I'm going about becoming great at what I do. I don't have any answers right now aside from reading more books, analyzing subjects like "what is the best way to use Linq" and post them here.

Oh well, I just felt like ranting a bit.