Through tears and mud, how else?

Honestly, by being thrown into fires and surviving them. A few things that accelerated it:

1. Building mental models of the entire stack - when you understand how data flows from request to database and back, you can narrow down "where" faster than "what"

2. Getting comfortable reading logs before reaching for the debugger. Production debugging is 80% log archaeology

3. Keeping a personal incident journal. After each outage I'd write what I assumed, what was actually wrong, and what evidence I missed. You start recognizing your own blind spots

4. Pair debugging with more senior engineers when possible. Watching how someone else navigates the same chaos teaches patterns you'd never discover alone

The uncomfortable truth is there's no shortcut - you have to accumulate scar tissue from actual incidents. But deliberate reflection on each one compounds faster than just moving on.