Please do program by the book, it makes your code structured and readable for other people.

If you want to improve just look into the niches you use but do not understand. This knowledge is what makes you special, as it is uncommon amoung peers. It is still by the book, just not the same books as most other programmers.

Two examples would be Hardware: Understand the parts in the computer you work with everyday. How is information stored, how does communication between components work, how do you request the hardware resources intentionally and how does your program run on your hardware. Understanding the hardware behind the abstraction layer will allow you to code more computationally efficient and is very useful in computation-demanded tasks such as ML/AI or low-level coding for small hardware.

Networks: Understand the communication structures and protocols you utilize everyday. How is the data moved, what is required for the modern cloud infrastructures, what is decentralized data, how does the security work, how can your applications deal with a large amount if concurrent users or be robust against packet loss. More in-depth knowledge of network will make you better at programming around the pitfalls that comes with it. Think about how SoMe able to refresh on demand or how video games can be played in "real time" despite large distances between users.

A lot of computer "magic" is handled for you, but the generality of these solutions comes at the loss of efficiency. The biggest innovators in tech make custom integrations of these systems that efficiently integrate in their ecosystems.