I passed a car this morning (interestingly enough, not a JEEP) with this bumper sticker, It's a JEEP thing - you wouldn't understand it and realized that that's exactly what makes the difference.

I've spent plenty time with developer friends fretting over the differences between good developers and ground level coders. I actually do have some JEEP friends as well and have heard enough to actually understand it. I remember one time when they told me of a meet where a girl got stuck in a mud pool with her JEEP. The crowd started chanting 'dive, dive, dive...'  ...and of course she did! She climbed the hood of the car, grabbed the winch  wire and dove and actually swam through the mud. It's a JEEP thing.

When speaking with non-developer acquaintances and they ask me what I do for a living, I rarely venture beyond answering that I work with computers. I couldn't tell them that I feel lost without my computer, about all the late nights trying to solve that last piece of a code puzzle and so on. They just wouldn't understand it. To some extent, I think that the same thing goes for the coder/developer issue. In the long run, there is only one thing that makes the difference.

It's all about the passion.