I don't think they're mutually exclusive, are they? I'm not at all trying to dissuade the OP from pursuing excellence. I think that's a noble and beautiful goal and I strongly encourage the OP to pursue it :) Just not at the exclusion of self-care.

Already, there's every indication that the OP is very capable of picking up new knowledge and technologies quickly, on their own. And HN being what it is, there will be plenty of specific domain knowledge from people who've done it longer, better, than I have (or ever could, really).

But how many of us were young and brilliant once, standing out in a sea of averages, starry-eyed with the whole world ahead of us, filled with unlimited potential... and little awareness of our limitations and fragility, present or future? Life experience is harder won than technical skills. We are, at the end of the day, still primates with deeply-rooted biological, social, physical, and emotional needs. Unless the OP manages to transform us all into the Borg.

OP, if you're reading this, just know that I'm rooting for you and hope to you see your name in the news (or repos, or credits) for years and decades to come. I said what I did only because I want that to remain the case well into your 30s, 40s, and beyond. Too many of us dev types start out eager and burn out early because of the stresses, ceilings, roller-coasters, limits, bureaucracies, whatever. If you browse the Ask HN section you'll find "Help, I'm burning out..." type posts with some frequency. Some change careers, others spiral into depression, etc. Maybe we should have our own version of the "27 Club".

Some people are lucky enough to be able to maintain a single laser focus through their entire lives, never deviating, never wanting anything more, and feeling empty when they're not doing that one thing. Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe a spectrum thing, maybe a genius thing, maybe all of the above and more... who knows? I'm not a brain scientist. But they're lucky, and relatively rare. It's not like that for most people.

For the rest of us, the pursuit of excellence -- however we might individually define it -- requires us to be able to, at a minimum, maintain a sufficient baseline of health and relationships so as to remain a "functional workaholic". Think of it as "devops for the mind and body". If you do just the bare minimum, which isn't much (a few hours a week, if that), you can wake up every day feeling rested and energized to do the work, avoid repetitive motion injuries or posture-related pains later in life, grow the networks you need to meet other people at the top of their game, have friends and colleagues to help you through hard times, etc.

And if you do more than the bare minimum, the network effects can compound and create a virtuous cycle. You might meet professionals in other fields working on hard problems but not seeing it through the eyes of a programmer: mathematicians, natural scientists, cartographers, rocket scientists, architects, musicians, artists, whatever. They can provide not just new problems to solve, but fresh perspectives that we don't see enough of in the dev world. Same thing if you develop more hobbies (drones can lead into photogrammetry and aeronautics, photography into sensors and machine vision, hiking into network graphs and GIS, dance into mocap and animation, whatever).

Then, when you become truly exceptional, you'll probably run into ecosystem limits created by your peers... not on purpose, but just because most of us are only slightly above average. For every John Carmack or Linus Torvalds or Ada Lovelace there are a million mediocre devs working on everyday projects. In the professional world, much of your own code will be surrounded or hamstrung by other people's mediocrity. When you reach that point, you can choose to improve it (which requires people skills to convince them to refactor and/or accept your PRs or let you onto their team), ignore it and continue on (which requires some degree of emotional maturity, enough to at least compartmentalize), move onto other problems (which requires you to know your interests and passions first), or all of the above.

A lone wolf coder can solve some problems on their own (see Bun, Linux, Git, Bitcoin, etc.), but there are other classes of problems that require bigger teams and/or massive investments (to turn Linux into Android phones, or Git into GitHub, or Bitcoin into Coinbase, etc.) Even John Carmack needed Facebook's resources to bring his VR vision to life, Musk needed his teams (and loads of money) for spaceflight and electric cars, Valve (the gaming company) took years to change the landscape, and so forth. Eventually you'll meet other brilliant people too, and how you choose to relate to them will in no small part determine the sorts of problems you get to work on, your work-life balance, how much you get paid, etc.

Your technical know-how is something that you can mostly control on your own, and I have every faith that you will master the knowledge (and then some, and hopefully come back to teach us). I just hope you can also master the rest of your life well enough to stay happy, healthy, humble, and productive (maybe even in that order).

I've ranted enough, lol. Have fun and good luck :)