Strongly disagree.

If you value your own self-worth based on other people's journeys, impressions or projections then there is a whole lot of introspection that you need to do before setting out to achieve anything in life.

If you take a look at the next sentence in the paragraph after your quote I quite clearly state "you can become as excellent an engineer as you are willing to work for". This is a field in which outputs are directly mapped to inputs.