Interesting, is the ability to know when to exit a prerequisite? I would think there's a distribution between those you spoke of and some that just picked one thing and went forever.

Well what I mean is there's an ability to see precisely when just enough is done -- no more, no less -- before one can hand things over and exit with sanity and / or dignity. It goes hand in hand. Many work very hard and quit before _the_ critical thing is done, which in a sense forfeits all prior work; others continue working and working and burn out. The best understand something about timing, almost in an intuitive sense. I've seen it again and again, and it's impressive.

Some people can build incredibly cool things in two weeks. It's not about stamina really. They typically outsource stamina to senior devs for future iterations and they move onto new more interesting things to create, and senior devs hate them for that ("you did all the cool, we do all the ugly"). But without them nothing of value would be built.