I'm not a psychologist, and this is anecdata so take what I say with a huge grain of salt, but I kind of feel like my life is sort of a testament to this.

I'm just old enough to where my high school didn't have any kind of computer-science course, but I learned programming on my own as a kid because I thought it was fun. At that time, it always was a quick way to get most adults to think you're some kind genius :). I dropped out of college after ~2 years, in no small part because I've never liked being told what I need to learn, but because I had already taught myself programming, I was able to find work.

I've tried to keep this mentality up throughout my all my life. It drives my wife crazy, but I'm constantly buying compsci or math books to try and learn a bit more and get just a little better at the theory of compsci, and hopefully becoming a better engineer in the process. I have no idea if I'm better than the "average" programmer, whatever that means, but I have managed to get good enough to where people ask me compsci theory questions at work, which is somewhat validating.