Counterintuitively, it also requires a willingness to break what appear at first to be unbreakable rules. Most of the worst programmers I know seem to see their work as "how can I accomplish a task without breaking what I see as the rules", without having fully understood the system. That quickly turns into copypasta, extra layers of abstraction, over configurability, and many of the other plagues of programming.
I think the two errors - imagining non-existent rules, and ignoring rules that exist - are related errors. The foundational skill is accepting that the machine is never wrong because the machine is also never "right", the machine doesn't actually make decisions, it's a construct of physics following a pile of physical laws and not a person to be negotiated with.
