Beautiful article. I would like to emphasise the importance of your first point, the knowledge of statistics. There are a lot of data science professionals who treat packages in R or Python as black boxes and don’t try to learn the stat fundamentals driving it.

Secondly, another underappreciated area is competitions. I started competing quite late, and realized how much I lost. Frankly, it’s very uncomfortable initially, but without pain there is no gain.

Regards