Anyone can code, but only the fearless can be great

I personally think that every programming task needs to be approached from the perspective of being completely bug-free. When you write code, think that it is going to be deployed on a rocket or a space-craft and that the lives of a few hundred depend on the robustness of the code. Of course, you can cut yourself some slack by making practical simplifying assumptions about the specific task at hand, but I'd rather programmers started with the strictest requirements and then loosened them rather than the other way around (which seems to be happening more often these days).